U.N. Leader Presses Assad on Peace Plan

“There is no time to waste,” Mr. Ban said, speaking in Kuwait

“I strongly urge President Assad to put these commitments into immediate effect,” he said, according to Reuters. “This is an important initial step that could bring an end to the violence and the bloodshed and provide aid to those people who are suffering.”

On Wednesday, activist groups quoted in news reports said government forces continued their drive against Mr. Assad’s adversaries, using heavy weapons to encircle and choke opposition strongholds in several areas

The London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights spoke of clashes from the Dera’a region in the south to the area surrounding Hama much further north. The Local Coordination Committees activist group said government troops had stormed the northern town of Saraqeb, leaving 40 people dead and the streets littered with unidentified corpses and wounded citizens after four days of attacks.

The group appealed to the Red Cross and other humanitarian organizations to "treat the injured and bury the martyrs." The group accused government troops of burning and shelling 300 homes and chasing away families related to the government’s opponents. Such reports cannot be verified because the authorities severely restrict access to reporters in an effort to control the flow of information, reducing it often to a trickle.

The United Nations’s top human rights official, Navi Pillay, accused the Syrian authorities of targeting the young.

“They’ve gone for the children — for whatever purposes — in large numbers,” Ms. Pillay said, in an interview with the BBC published on Wednesday. “Hundreds detained and tortured — it’s just horrendous. “Children shot in the knees, held together with adults in really inhumane conditions, denied medical treatment for their injuries, either held as hostages or as sources of information.”

The United Nations raised its estimated tally of the dead in the conflict to more than 9,000, from 8,000 a few weeks ago.

On Tuesday, Kofi Annan, the United Nations special envoy for Syria, reported that Mr. Assad’s government had formally accepted a six-point peace plan. But anti-Assad groups inside Syria reported that at least 57 people were killed throughout the country, including the area bordering this northern Lebanon village. Such fighting suggests that the conflict could be in danger of spilling over into Lebanon. The Lebanese military said Tuesday that no Syrian troops or vehicles had trespassed, although an officer said a mortar shell had landed 40 yards inside Lebanon.

The peace plan has emerged as a focus of diplomacy as the myriad players in the Syria crisis — ranging from external powers to exiled dissidents — sought to increase pressure on Mr. Assad, with varying degrees of unity.

Some of his fractious opponents outside the country, meeting in Istanbul to seek a common front, said late Tuesday they had agreed to reunite under the Syrian National Council, whose Paris-based leadership projects itself as the main umbrella group for exiled dissidents.

But the agreement left out representatives of Syria’s large Kurdish minority, who complained that their demands for special status in a post-Assad era were not being taken into account. News reports said the trade-off for even limited unity had been an agreement by the council’s leader, Burhan Ghalioun, to discuss restructuring the movement in further talks among the exiles in Istanbul on Wednesday.

The Syrian groups were meeting ahead of a gathering on Sunday in Istanbul of the so-called Friends of Syria including many Arab and Western governments seeking Mr. Assad’s ouster.