Annan regretted an “increasing militarization” of the 17-month conflict, AFP reported.

 

He also hit out at “continuous finger-pointing and name-calling” at the UN Security Council which he said had prevented coordinated action to end the bloodshed.

 

“I did not receive all the support that the cause deserved,” Annan told a hastily scheduled press conference in Geneva after his resignation was announced by UN chief Ban Ki-moon at UN headquarters in New York.

 

“You have to understand: as an envoy, I can't want peace more than the protagonists, more than the Security Council or the international community for that matter.”

 

Annan said “continuous finger-pointing and name-calling” in the Security Council had hindered his attempts to implement his six-point peace plan that was supposed to start with a reciprocal ceasefire from April 12 that never took hold.

 

 

“The increasing militarization on the ground and the lack of unanimity in the Security Council fundamentally changed my role,” he said.

 

On Thursday, Russia blamed the United States for the resignation of Kofi Annan as the joint United Nations and Arab League envoy for the Syria crisis.

 

“When yesterday the Washington Post came up with an article which was harshly critical of Kofi Annan, I think if the United States were really in support of the special envoy, the spokesman of the State Department could have said a few things in defense of the special envoy,” Russian Ambassador to the United Nations, Vitaly Churkin, told reporters after a UN Security Council briefing on Syria at the UN headquarters in New York City.

 

Churkin also criticized foreign media for following a propaganda line in their coverage of the unrest in Syria. He specifically spoke of the media coverage of the situation in Aleppo and accused the foreign media of lacking objectivity.

 

Meanwhile, UN under-secretary for the peacekeeping operations Herve Ladsous admitted that the armed groups fighting Damascus have been provided with heavy weapons, including tanks. 

 

“The opposition, yes, we know for a fact that the opposition does have heavy weapons- that we have seen. We have not yet seen the opposition in the action of using those heavy weapons against government forces but we know that they have tanks; that they have armored personnel carriers etcetera. That’s a fact,” Ladsous said.

 

Syria has been experiencing unrest since March 2011. Damascus says outlaws, saboteurs, and armed terrorists are the driving factor behind the unrest and deadly violence while the opposition accuses the security forces of being behind the killings. 

 

Western states have been calling for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to step down. However, Russia and China are strongly opposed to the Western drive to oust Assad. 

 

The Syrian government says that the chaos is being orchestrated from outside the country, and there are reports that a very large number of the armed militants are foreign nationals, mostly from Egypt, Algeria, Saudi Arabia, and Afghanistan.