LITTLE ROCK — Syria’s civil war entangled the U.N. peacekeeping operation in the disputed Golan Heights between Syria and Israel for the first time Wednesday when 30 armed insurgent fighters seized a group of 20 armed peacekeepers investigating a damaged observation post and threatened to treat them as enemy prisoners if Syrian forces remained in the area.
As the war has worsened, the Golan region has been periodically disrupted by armed clashes and occasional artillery or mortar bombardments that have become a source of concern to Israel. But U.N. officials said members of the Golan peacekeeping mission, officially known as the U.N. Disengagement Observer Force, had never before been seized by any of the combatants in the conflict.
Josephine Guerrero, a spokesman for the Departments of Peacekeeping and Field Support at the United Nations, which oversees the Golan operation, said the peacekeepers were detained near an observation post that had been evacuated over the weekend after what she called “heavy combat in proximity” near the village of Al Jamlah, in the southern part of the operation’s region of control. She said the mission was “dispatching a team to assess the situation and attempt a resolution,” and that the Syrian authorities had been asked to help.
Guerrero said she had no further information on the insurgents involved or the nationalities of the detainees. But the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an opposition group based in Britain with a network of contacts inside Syria, said they were Filipino.
A video uploaded on You-Tube by a group that identified itself as the Martyrs of Yarmouk claimed responsibility and said the peacekeepers would be held until Syrian government forces had withdrawn from the area around Al Jamlah.
The video does not show any of the captives, but U.N. vehicles are visible. A speaker in the video warns in Arabic: “If the withdrawal does not take place within 24 hours, we will deal with those guys like war prisoners. And praise to God.”
The threat to the peacekeepers underscored the widening risks that the Syria conflict is destabilizing itsborders. On Monday, more than 40 Syrian soldiers who had sought temporary safety in Iraq were killed in an ambush as the Iraqi military was transporting them back to the Syrian border.
At the United Nations, Eduardo del Buey, a spokesman for Secretary-General Ban Kimoon, suggested that officials had long feared the possibility of harm to the peacekeepers.
“As the secretary-general has said repeatedly, the spillover effects of the Syrian crisis pose a danger to the region as a whole and to the countries and the areas in the neighboring states around it, and UNDOF is no exception,” he said, using the acronym for the Golan peacekeeping mission. “They are in a zone where the spillover could be of consequence.”
Ambassador Vitaly Churkin of Russia, which holds the monthly presidency of the Security Council for March, said members had been briefed about the Golan situation butthat he could provide no further information on what precisely had happened. Churkin, whose government is a main supporter of the Syrian government in the conflict and a strong critic of the armed rebels, urged the captors to release the peacekeepers immediately.
“They should stop this very dangerous course of action,” he said.
Linking the Golan situation to the Iraq killings two days earlier, Churkin said: “Some people are trying very hard to extend the Syrian conflict. Today there is this incident. This is no man’s land between Syria and Israel. Somebody is trying very hard to blow this crisis up.”
News of the peacekeeper seizure came on a day of other precedents in the two-year Syrian conflict, which has left more than 70,000 people dead.
Anti-government fighters battling military forces in the north-central city of Raqqa released a video on YouTube corroborating their claims that they had arrested the provincial governor and the provincial secretary-generalof President Bashar Assad’s Baath Party, who activists said were the two highest-ranking Assad loyalists captured so far. The video showed both men seated uncomfortably on an ornate couch, surrounded by insurgents.
The U.N. refugee agency in Geneva said the number of Syrians who had fled to neighboring countries surpassed the 1 million mark, coupling the announcement with a renewed appeal for more aid.
“Syria is spiraling towards full-scale disaster,” the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, Antonio Guterres, said in a statement.
In London on Wednesday, Foreign Secretary William Hague said Britain was prepared to supply armored allterrain vehicles, body armor and other “nonlethal military equipment” to the Syrian opposition, apparently nudging his government’s public support for the rebels beyond the food and medical supplies pledged last week by the United States.
Information for this article was contributed by Hania Mourtada, DavidD. Kirkpatrick, Nick Cumming-Bruce and Liam Stack of The New YorkTimes; and by Karin Laub, Barbara Surk, Bassem Mroue, Zeina Karam, Jamal Halaby, David Rising, Don Melvin, Jill Lawless and Edith M. Lederer of The Associated Press.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 03/07/2013