BICOM

US President Barack Obama called on his Syrian counterpart, Bashar Assad, to step down yesterday after months of state sponsored aggression against anti-government protests, which have resulted in the deaths of 2,000 civilians. The US also imposed a new round of sanctions on the Syrian government, froze their assets in the US and banned the purchase of Syrian petrol in the country. Obama said that it was up to the Syrian people to decide their future and Assad was standing in the way and preventing them from doing this.  “His calls for dialogue and reform have rung hollow while he is imprisoning, torturing, and slaughtering his own people,” Obama said about Assad. “For the sake of the Syrian people, the time has come for President Assad to step aside.” Yesterday, the EU issued the same call for Assad to step down and threatened to impose tougher sanctions.

In related news, the United Nations plans to send a team to Syria this weekend to assess the humanitarian situation there after the government’s harsh crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators, a UN official said on Thursday. Humanitarian affairs chief Valerie Amos told the UN Security Council at a closed-door meeting on Syria that Damascus had agreed to allow a team led by the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs to visit Syria on Saturday, a diplomat told Reuters on condition of anonymity.