BEIRUT — With a new warning that strife-torn Syria confronts a "catastrophic" fate, the United Nations said Wednesday that it would convene an emergency session this weekend in a bid to salvage a U.N.-brokered peace plan that has failed to halt the nation's slide toward civil war.
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton agreed to participate in the "Action Group for Syria" meeting Saturday in Geneva after U.N. special envoy Kofi Annan excluded Iran, Washington's foe and a stalwart ally of Syrian President Bashar Assad. British officials also welcomed a new plan by Annan and Foreign Secretary William Hague said he would attend the session, as will diplomats from the three other U.N. Security Council permanent member nations: France, Russia and China.
The top U.S. diplomat said Annan had devised a "political transition road map" that provides some hope for resolving a conflict that is escalating into an unchecked cycle of sectarian killings, kidnappings and atrocities by both sides, according to a new U.N. report.
"The situation on the ground is dangerously and quickly deteriorating," the U.N. Human Rights Council wrote. "Further militarization of the crisis will be catastrophic."
Details of Annan's new plan were not disclosed. Ministers meeting in Geneva will seek to agree on "guidelines and principles for a Syrian-led pollical transition," his office said in a statement.
Clinton clearly endorsed the approach as an improvement on the special envoy's failed entreaties to Assad to take "bold steps" to implement the U.N.-brokered peace plan.
U.S. officials have insisted on a "political transition" mandate, a phrase that does not appear in Annan's original six-point plan. Clinton said she had spoken with Annan three times in the last 24 hours.
"If Kofi Annan is able to lay down a political transition road map ... that is endorsed by Russia and China, for example, that sends a very different message," Clinton told reporters in Helsinki, Finland. "That's the first time that the international community will really evidence a direction that I think Assad will have to respond to."
Russia and China, which have veto power on the Security Council, have twice blocked resolutions condemning Assad's crackdown on dissent. The resolutions could have opened the door to U.N.-authorized sanctions or even military intervention.
There has been no public indication that Russia and China have ended their opposition to any international action aimed at forcing Assad from office. Washington and its allies have insisted on the departure of Assad, whose family has ruled Syria in autocratic fashion for more than 40 years.
U.S. officials say Assad is losing control of the country, evident in increased military defections, fighting closer to the capital, and Syria's downing last week of a Turkish military jet, an incident that infuriated neighboring Turkey, a regional powerhouse.
"We have made it clear to the Russians that the outcome they are most concerned about, which would be a sectarian civil war, is made more likely, not less likely, by the international community's failure to take a strong position vis-a-vis the Assad regime," Clinton said.
Both the Syrian government and the armed opposition have widely ignored Annan's peace plan, which, among other things, calls on the government to withdraw its forces and heavy armor from populated areas and allow people to protest freely. Many analysts say the government would collapse if such steps were taken. At least 10,000 people have been killed since the rebellion erupted almost 16 months ago.
The new U.N. report found that the violence had increased dramatically since an April 12 "cease-fire" began and that abuses by both sides, including extrajudicial killings, kidnappings and torture, have become rampant. In addition, the fractured rebel militias present more and more of a challenge to Assad's forces, "who are exhibiting a certain fatigue."
Government forces were accused of "indiscriminate shelling," firing on peaceful protesters and inflaming communal tension. The inquiry found that some prisoners were forced to proclaim, "There is no God but Bashar" — a humiliation for the mostly Sunni Muslim population that predominates among the rebels.
Investigators also documented "a growing number of incidents where victims appear to have been targeted because of their religious affiliation."
The report quotes a rebel fighter saying that Syrian soldiers who are members of Assad's minority Alawite sect "are normally killed immediately upon capture, while soldiers from other sects are offered the chance to join" the Free Syrian Army, a rebel umbrella group.
Violence continued to rage Wednesday, with the state-run Syrian news agency saying that "armed terrorist groups" — its label for anti-Assad rebels — had stormed a pro-government television station outside Damascus, the capital, ransacking and bombing the compound and killing seven people, including three journalists.
The report came as accounts grew of fighting in the suburbs of the capital, which has been insulated from the violence elsewhere in Syria.
The official news agency said the TV station attackers set off explosives in the offices of the Ikhbariya channel and executed journalists "in cold blood." It labeled the attack "a massacre against journalism and the freedom of media."
Also scheduled to attend Saturday's U.N. conference on Syria are Turkey, Iraq, Kuwait and Qatar.
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Special correspondent Rima Marrouch in Beirut and Times staff writer Paul Richter in Washington contributed to this report.