Violence gripped areas across Syria on Tuesday, with at least three people killed, as a United Nations advance team in charge of monitoring a fragile ceasefire in the country started to prepare logistics for their observer mission reported. Government forces shelled areas in the central city of Homs from the early morning, while clashes took place between troops and defectors near the Syrian-Jordanian border, opposition activists said. "The fighting is concentrating in an area called al-Jaat and Basr al-Harir, in the southern city of Daraa. The government forces are trying to storm the area where defectors have strongholds, but all their attempts have so far failed," Rami Abdul-Rahman, the head of the London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, told dpa. Activists said three people were killed in Daraa. A spokesman for peacekeeping missions at the UN, Kieran Dwyer, said the important step for observers would be "to get out of Damascus and visit other areas, establish contact with all sides in those cities and towns, and decide where other operational bases can be established."
