Embattled Syrian President Bashar al-Assad “will not escape justice,” the French foreign ministry stressed Thursday.

“France does not give any credibility to Bashar al-Assad’s provocative statements, which totally contradict with the fact that acts of repression and violence against the Syrian people have continued unabated,” ministry spokesman Bernard Valero told reporters, referring to Assad’s recent interview with ABC News.

Iraq said it would try to convince neighboring Syria to accept an Arab League deal to end unrest and head off sweeping economic sanctions, during a visit by the group's chief to Baghdad on Thursday.

Arab League chief Nabil al-Arabi told journalists in the Iraqi capital that "the ball is in the Syrian court" but warned that if Damascus wanted to avoid sanctions, it would have to sign on to the initiative.

Syrian security forces on Thursday killed at least seven civilians including a woman in an assault on the restive central city of Homs, activists said.

The deaths occurred as the security forces used sniper fire and "arbitrary" shelling during raids on three districts of the city, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said in a statement sent to Agence France Presse.

Armed "terrorists" have blown up an oil pipeline west of the flashpoint Syrian city of Homs, the official SANA news agency reported on Thursday.

"An armed terrorist group targeted in a sabotage operation the pipeline of Tal al-Shor, west of Homs," Syria's third-largest city, SANA said.

Syrian activists on Thursday launched a campaign of civil disobedience to pile pressure on President Bashar Assad, after he drew a stinging rebuke from the U.S. for denying he ordered a deadly crackdown.

Local human rights groups said more than 100 people have been killed in Syria since the weekend, and the U.N. estimates at least 4,000 have died since March when anti-regime protests erupted.

Turkey announced on Wednesday a new set of sanctions against Syria as ties between the two former allies strained further over the Damascus regime's deadly crackdown on opponents.

"We will impose 30 percent tax on goods coming from Syria," Customs and Trade Minister Hayati Yazici was quoted as saying by the private NTV television.

The United States said Wednesday that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad was either disconnected from reality or "crazy" after he argued he was not responsible for killing thousands of protesters.

State Department spokesman Mark Toner reiterated the U.S. view that Assad has lost legitimacy and should step down after the Syrian leader said in a rare interview that "only a crazy person" would kill his own people.

The regime of President Bashar al-Assad on Wednesday urged Syrians to vote en masse in municipal elections next week, while its crackdown on dissent showed no signs of abating.

"December 12 is an important moment. All citizens must take part in the municipal elections and vote for the candidates they consider best capable of defending the public interest," wrote Al-Baath, the newspaper of the ruling party which has been in power since 1963.

Syria's isolation will intensify if Damascus fails to stop killing protesters, the British Foreign Office's minister for the Middle East, Alistair Burt, said on Wednesday.

"These killings must stop," Burt told Agence France Presse in Tripoli, where he reopened the British Council which had been closed during the armed revolt against Moammar Gadhafi's regime.

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad denied ordering the killing of thousands of protesters and said "only a crazy person" would target his own people, in a U.S. television interview released Wednesday.

Speaking to ABC News, Assad brushed off widening international sanctions and questioned the U.N. death toll of more than 4,000 since the eruption of the unrest in March, saying most victims were government supporters.