Syrian rebels free Filipino UN peacekeepers after four days

The episode is bound to prompt new questions about UN operations in Syria and create a negative wave of publicity for those fighting the regime forces of Bashar Al Assad.

UN peacekeepers of the United Nations Disengagement Observer Force cross a checkpoint between Israel and Syria in the occpupied Golan Heights on Saturday. A group of 21 Filipino UN peacekeepers seizedShow more

BEIRUT // Syrian rebels freed 21 UN peacekeepers yesterday after holding them hostage for four days, ending a sudden entanglement with the world body that earned fighters trying to oust president Bashar Al Assad a flood of negative publicity.

The episode is bound to prompt new questions about UN operations in Syria. The peacekeepers were part of a force that has spent four decades monitoring an Israeli-Syrian ceasefire without incident.

The Filipino peacekeepers crossed from Syria to safety in Jordan yesterday afternoon, said Mokhtar Lamani, the Damascus representative of the UN-Arab League peace envoy to Syria.

UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon welcomed their release, and called on all parties in Syria to respect the peacekeepers' freedom of movement.

The peacekeepers were seized on Wednesday and were held in the village of Jamlah in south-western Syria, near Jordan and the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights.

Their captors from the Martyrs of the Yarmouk Brigades initially said they would only release the hostages once Syrian troops withdrew from the area. In the days leading up to the abduction, rebels had overrun several regime checkpoints and apparently feared reprisals.

However, as the abduction made headlines, the rebels eventually dropped their demand and began negotiating a safe passage for the peacekeepers with UN officials. On Friday, a UN team tried to retrieve the hostages, but aborted the plan because of heavy regime shelling of the area.

Yesterday, another UN team headed towards Jamlah to try again, said a rebel spokesman. He said the UN team aborted the mission because of fighting in the area, and that the rebels instead escorted the hostages to the Syrian-Jordanian border.

Mr Lamani said the UN team was near Jamlah and was waiting for the rebels to hand over the hostages when the rebels changed their minds and instead drove the peacekeepers to the Jordanian border.

"They asked us to wait for an hour as they negotiated between themselves. Then we were surprised to hear to hear the news from a satellite channel that they had reached Jordan," he said. "Praise God in the end that all of them were released safely."

For its part, the Syrian foreign ministry said in a letter to the United Nations that was shared with the media that the Syrian army had held its fire in the area "out of concern for the security and safety of the UN forces".

It called on the UN to "unequivocally condemn the attacks of those terrorist groups against civilians and work to dislodge those terrorist groups immediately from the region".

The Syria government says the uprising is a foreign-backed conspiracy to weaken the country carried out by "terrorists" - its blanket term for the opposition.

Many rebel groups operate independently, despite efforts by the Syrian opposition to unify the fighters under one command. The abduction appeared to have been such a local initiative, and leaders of the political opposition repeatedly urged the Jamlah rebels to free the hostages.

The peacekeepers are part of a UN monitoring mission known as UNDOF. It was set up in 1974, seven years after Israel captured the plateau and a year after it managed to push back Syrian troops trying to recapture the territory in another regional war. The UN monitors have helped enforce a stable truce between Israel and Syria.

But in recent months, Syrian mortar shells overshooting their target have repeatedly hit the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights. In Israel's most direct involvement so far, Israeli warplanes struck inside Syria in January, according to US officials who said the target was a convoy carrying anti-aircraft weapons bound for Hizbollah, a Lebanese militia allied with Mr Al Assad and Iran.

Israeli officials have expressed concern that the violence might prompt UNDOF to end its mission.

On Friday, UN spokesman Martin Nesirky said "the mission in the Golan needs to review its security arrangements and it has been doing that."

The Syria conflict began two years ago, starting with largely peaceful protests against Mr Al Assad. A harsh regime crackdown triggered an armed insurgency that has turned into a full-scale civil war. The UN estimates that the conflict has claimed more than 70,000 lives and forced nearly 4 million people from their homes. The fighting has devastated large areas of the country.