FRANCE PRESS

ISTANBUL/DAMASCUS: Opponents of Syrian President Bashar Assad met in Istanbul Sunday to launch a “national council” to coordinate the fight against the government in Damascus as a U.N. humanitarian team arrived in the Syrian capital. Participants in two days of meetings at an Istanbul hotel, from both inside and outside Syria, planned to set up working groups and draft measures aimed at ousting Assad.
“The Syrian national council will have between 115 and 150 members, more than half of whom are in Syria, with the remainder in exile,” said dissident Obeida al-Nahhas.

Emerging from more than eight weeks of talks between opposition groups, the council’s objective is to “make the voice of the Syrian revolution and its demands heard by the international community,” he said.
“It must incarnate the aspirations of the Syrian revolution and establish its political aims.”
Nahhas said the council would have seven or eight committees to handle such issues as foreign affairs, political planning and economic matters.

The meeting could end with a final declaration, though organizers said no permanent decisions would be made.
“Our priority No. 1 is to topple the regime” in Syria, U.S.-based lawyer and activist Yasser Tabbara said.
“This is a consultative meeting to discuss the establishment of a national council that would be a platform to bring together all different sections of the Syrian opposition and representatives from the pro-democratic movement in Syria,” Tabbara said.

A Turkish source said security measures had been taken to ensure the meeting passed off without problems.
Meanwhile Sunday, a U.N. humanitarian mission began its first full day in Damascus, arriving the previous evening to assess humanitarian needs in the wake of the crackdown which have left more than 2,000 people dead.

The team, led by the head of the Geneva bureau of the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, Rashid Khalikov, began its mission Sunday and will stay until Aug. 25, said OCHA spokeswoman Elisabeth Byrs.
Speaking on the telephone from Geneva, she said the mission’s objectives were “to see how the U.N. can support public services and how it can respond to possible humanitarian needs,” such as electricity, drinking water, communications and health.

The visit comes after 34 anti-regime protesters were killed Friday by security forces as anti-regime rallies gripped the country after weekly Muslim prayers, according to the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
Also Sunday, the International Committee of the Red Cross expressed hopes its delegates would soon visit Syrians jailed since the start of the protests.

“There have been discussions with the authorities and we are confident that we will be able to start the visits very soon,” Red Cross spokesman Saleh Dabbakeh told AFP in the Syrian capital without elaborating.
Rights groups say that more than 10,000 people have been jailed in Syria, which has been gripped by almost daily anti-regime protests since mid-March.