Syrians Bar U.N. Monitors From a Massacre Inquiry

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Syrians Bar U.N. Monitors From a Massacre Inquiry

ANTAKYA, Turkey — The Syrian conflict escalated to a dangerous new level on Thursday when government troops and their civilian supporters blocked unarmed United Nations monitors from investigating a massacre of farm families, prompting sharp denunciations of Damascus from diplomats who have struggled vainly to find a workable, consensus solution to the crisis.

The monitors were thwarted from reaching the tiny hamlet of Qubeir, just west of Hama, to check on what activists say was the slaying of as many as 78 people, half of them women and children, who were shot, garroted and in some cases burned alive. The monitors themselves were fired upon, United Nations officials said.

The standoff at a government checkpoint seemed to symbolize the international paralysis over how to stem the bloodshed. It would be the fourth massacre in two weeks and suggested that the Syrian conflict was spiraling, seemingly daily, toward a sectarian civil war, pitting a government dominated by the Alawite sect against members of a Sunni Muslim majority feeling vulnerable to slaughter with no consequence. The Qubeir victims were all thought to be Sunnis.

The massacre and the government’s attempt to prevent the monitors from investigating it came as Kofi Annan, the special envoy from the United Nations and the Arab League, addressed both the General Assembly and the Security Council in an effort to salvage his six-point peace plan from irrelevance. He warned that the already terrible violence would only increase without concerted international pressure, which should be exerted through some kind of “contact group” involving key international powers and Syria’s neighbors.

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