Arab League foreign ministers are to hold an emergency meeting on a massacre in Syria in which UN observers say government forces killed 92 people, the League's current president Kuwait said Sunday. “Kuwait will contact members of the Arab League to hold an emergency ministerial meeting to study the situation and take measures to put an end to the oppressive practices against the Syrian people,” said a foreign ministry statement cited by the official KUNA news agency. Kuwait has also made contacts at regional and international levels “to urge the international community to assume its responsibility to stop the bloodshed,” the ministry said. It strongly condemned the “brutal crime carried out by the Syrian regime forces in the town of Houla which resulted in the killing of dozens, most of them children and women.” UAE Foreign Minister Sheikh Abdullah Al-Nahayan called Saturday for an urgent Arab League meeting, saying the “massacre shows the failure of Arab and international efforts to stop the violence against civilians in Syria.” The six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council, grouping Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, also urged the international community to “assume its responsibilities.” Meanwhile, the Syrian army kept up its bombardment of rebel strongholds Sunday despite an international outcry over the killing of 92 people, a third of them children, in the shelling of Houla. Government troops raked rebel neighborhoods of the central city of Hama with heavy machinegun fire, while the town of Rastan to its south came under artillery fire for a 14th straight day, a human rights watchdog said. Rebel fighters who pulled out of the flashpoint central city of Homs earlier this year in the face of a devastating assault by the army are holed up in Rastan, activists say.
