BBC News with Sue Montgomery

Harrowing eyewitness accounts have been emerging from the Syrian town of Houla, where more than 100 people were killed on Friday, in what the United Nations is calling a 'brutal massacre'. Several survivors spoke to the BBC. One said only four of her 20 family members survived after Alawite militia and Syrian security forces

burst into

the house with knives and Kalashnikov automatic rifles. The international envoy to Syria Kofi Annan, who's in Damascus, said he was shocked and horrified by the killings. At the same time, violence across Syria shows no sign of easing as Jim Muir reports.

Activists reported clashes and deaths in at least seven different parts of the country as the

fallout

from the Houla massacre continue to be felt both in Syria and around the world. Kofi Annan arriving in Damascus said it was a critical moment. He would be having serious and frank discussions with President Assad, he said, trying to persuade him to take bold steps to prove he was serious about peace. He will be pressing Mr Assad to make good on his earlier promise under the peace plan to withdraw his military and their heavy weapons back to

barracks

.

The Sudanese army says it will

pull its troops out of

the disputed border region of Abyei, which it

unilaterally

seized a year ago, forcing some 100,000 civilians to flee the area. A spokesman in Khartoum described the move as a