DAMASCUS: The UN Security Council has taken up the Syria crisis on Friday. Western and Arab nations will hold talks on a draft resolution denouncing the Bashar Al Assad regime that has been blocked by Damascus’s allies Beijing and Moscow.

The head of the Arab League monitoring mission in Syria said the unrest had soared “in a significant way,” especially in the flashpoint central cities of Homs and Hama and in the northern Idlib region since Tuesday.

Syrian forces have stepped up their crackdown, with activists reporting almost 100 dead in two days. The UN council’s five permanent members met on Thursday.

UN chief Ban Ki-moon urged the Security Council to speak with one voice on Syria and diplomats hope for a vote early next week.

“We have to seize this moment, we have to help these people. They have been oppressed for so long,” Ban said.

Russia said it could not support the draft on Syria being proposed by Western and Arab nations because it still failed to take Moscow’s position into account.

The new draft, “does not take proper account of our position,” Deputy Foreign Minister Gennady Gatilov was quoted as saying by ITAR-TASS.

Meanwhile, violence in Syria claimed at least 35 lives, including the first fatalities in the commercial city of Aleppo and a car bomb in the northwest, the Syrian Observatory for Human rights said.

Syrian forces killed at least 23 civilians across Syria, the watchdog said, including 12 in Nawa in the southern province of Daraa, five people in Aleppo, four in Homs, one person in nearby Hama and a child in Damascus province.