“We are entering a sensitive phase. The regime is on its last legs,” Kurdish activist Abdel Basset Sayda said shortly after being named the new leader of the opposition Syrian National Council.

“The multiplying massacres and shellings show that it is struggling,” he said of mass deaths of civilians, the most recent of which saw 20 people, mostly women and children, killed in a bombardment of the southern city of Daraa on Saturday.

29 killed across Syria

Violence around the country on Sunday, claimed the lives of at least 29 people, bringing the death toll since the start of the uprising against President Bashar Al Assad’s regime to more than 14,100, a monitoring group said.

Those killed since March last year comprised 9,862 civilians, 3,470 soldiers and 783 army deserters, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said. The Britain-based watchdog counts rebel fighters who are not military deserters as civilians.

At his first Press conference since taking over the reins, Sayda called on all members of the Damascus regime to defect, while reaching out to minority groups by promising them a full say in a future, democratic Syria.

“We call upon all officials in the regime and in the institutions to defect from the regime,” Sayda told reporters in Istanbul.

The Free Syrian Army (FSA) meanwhile called for a campaign of mass “civil disobedience”, and also urged officers and troops in President Bashar Al Assad’s regime to jump ship and join the rebel ranks.

“We call on Syrians to launch a general strike leading to mass civil disobedience,” FSA spokesman in Syria Colonel Kassem Saadeddine said in a statement.

He urged officers and men in Syria’s regular army “whose hands are not tainted with blood to join the fighters”.

He said that for the FSA, largely comprising Syrian military deserters, “the hour of liberation and change has come”.

“Soldiers, non-commissioned officers and officers are called upon to join the rebellion and the ranks of the Free Syrian Army,” he said.

New SNC chief Sayda replaced Paris-based academic Burhan Ghalioun, who stepped down last month in the face of mounting splits that were undermining the group’s credibility.

Activists accused Ghalioun of ignoring the Local Coordination Committees, which spearhead anti-government protests on the ground in Syria, and of giving the Muslim Brotherhood too big a role.

Sayda, 55, has lived in exile in Sweden for two decades and is seen as a consensus candidate capable of reconciling the rival factions within the SNC and of broadening its appeal among Syria’s myriad of ethnic and confessional groups.

The violence has intensified despite the presence in Syria of 300 United Nations observers charged with monitoring a truce that was supposed to take effect from April 12.

On Saturday, at least 111 people — 83 civilians and 28 soldiers — were killed, according to revised figures from the Observatory, in one of the heaviest single-day death tolls since the nominal start of the ceasefire.

By late on Sunday afternoon violence across Syria had killed at least 29 civilians, including 11 soldiers, the Observatory reported.

The troops were killed in clashes with armed rebels in the southern province of Daraa, in the central Homs province and in an attack on a military convoy in the eastern province of Deir Ezzor, it said.

Four civilians and an activist were killed in shelling of the town of Qusayr on the border with Lebanon, where rebels blew up a building housing government offices, the Observatory said.

Troops also shelled the Khalidiyeh neighbourhood of Homs city and other neighbourhoods, killing three other civilians, as surveillance aircraft flew overhead, it added.

Another three civilians were killed in a similar bombardment of the town of Talbisseh, 10km from the border, the Observatory said. Another civilian was killed in the Homs province rebel town of Rastan, it added.

There was also bloodshed in the Deir Al Assafir region near Damascus, where a civilian was shot dead by security forces during search operations.

In the northwestern province of Idlib an elderly man was killed by regime forces while two other civilians died when helicopter gunships opened fire on the Hayyan region of the northern province of Aleppo, the NGO added.

Hundreds of rebels, meanwhile, remained holed up in Latakia province, a loyalist stronghold.

The army sent troop reinforcements as rebels have grouped in an enclave around the town of Al Heffa, the Observatory said. Loyalist forces bombarded the town and surrounding villages for a sixth straight day, it said.

Nearly 60 soldiers have died since June 5 in battles with opposition fighters in the enclave, which lies some 50km from the Turkish border. At least 46 civilians and rebels have also been killed.

“The army is suffering its worst losses now in Al Heffa, as hundreds of rebels are holed up in this area of steep mountains,” Observatory head Rami Abdel Rahman said.

He said the resistance in a province where most of the population are members of Assad’s Alawi minority showed that the uprising was truly nationwide.

“The coast is no longer a safe area, and the whole country is now involved in the revolt,” he said.

In Idlib province, a rebel stronghold province in the northwest, thousands joined a funeral procession in the town of Maaret Al Numan for nine of 13 civilians killed in shelling on Saturday, the Observatory said.