UN team ready for Syria deployment

A United Nations team of 30 unarmed military observers is ready to deploy to Syria to begin a monitoring mission as soon as the Security Council approves its mission, a spokesman for special envoy Kofi Annan has said.The team is “standing by” to begin overseeing a tenuous but apparently stable ceasefire, said Ahmad Fawzi, a spokesman for the joint UN-Arab League envoy.Fawzi told Al Jazeera on Friday that scattered reports of violence in Syria did not mean the ceasefire was failing and called on both sides to exercise restraint.“With every cessation of hostilities there will be skirmishes, this is not unusual, sometimes the parties test each other,” he said.“There may continue to be skirmishes for hours or even days, but the fact of the matter remains that heavy shelling ... has died down.”The continued presence of government troops and armoured vehicles in cities and other civilian areas, a violation of one of the six key points in Annan’s peace plan, was “extremely” concerning, Fawzi said, but more important was a halt to the killing.“The most important thing is that the guns remain silent,” he said. “Wherever their positions, we hope they should and will remain silent.”In what promised to be a test of the ceasefire, protesters planned regular Friday demonstrations for the afternoon, and Syrian forces tightened security in public squares and outside mosques.An activist in a town near the Turkish border told Al Jazeera’s Anita McNaught, reporting from Turkey, that pro-government armed groups known as shabiha had personally threatened to kill residents who protested on Friday.Burhan Ghalioun, the exiled head of the Syrian National Council, said he expected demonstrations on Friday after weekly prayers - a feature of the revolt that had been subdued by violence in recent months. But he did not trust the authorities who had their “hand on the trigger”.“The Syrian people will go out tomorrow in the biggest possible numbers so that the Syrian people can express their will,” Ghalioun said.