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But the killings have continued, and the mission has been mired in controversy, much of it focused on its leader: a Sudanese general who, rights activists say, presided over the same kind of deadly and heavy-handed tactics in Sudan that the Arab League mission is seeking to curb in Syria.
Lt. Gen. Muhammad Ahmed al-Dabi, who once ran Sudan’s notorious military intelligence agency, has only compounded the criticism with his recent statements.
Last week, he spoke dismissively about the damage in Homs, a rebellious city that was shelled by government tanks and where dozens of people were killed. “Some places looked a bit of a mess, but there was nothing frightening,” Reuters quoted him as saying.
On Sunday, he publicly contradicted an Arab League observer who told residents in the city of Dara’a that he had seen government snipers and would tell Syrian officials to remove them.
“But he didn’t see,” General Dabi told the BBC, asserting that the observer was referring to a hypothetical case.
In interviews, several people who have dealt with the general said he was a likable and efficient administrator, and some said it was conceivable that he could run the observer mission with fairness.
Others, though, called him exactly the wrong kind of person to lead such a mission: a career enforcer for an authoritarian government who had shown a harsh hand in dealing with opponents.
“I don’t know if they looked into his background,” said Faisal Mohammed Salih, a columnist with the Sudanese newspaper Al Akhbar. “This is a human rights mission. They should have chosen someone who is sensitive to human rights issues. Military men in the Arab world should be the last choice for such missions.”
Several attempts to reach General Dabi on his cellphone or through the observer delegation’s office in Damascus were unsuccessful.
On Monday, the Arab League came to his defense. At a news conference in Cairo, the league’s director, Nabil al-Araby, called General Dabi a “capable military man with a clean reputation,” The Associated Press reported.
Mr. Araby addressed criticism that the observer mission was weak, understaffed and easily manipulated by the government, saying the observers were trying to be less reliant on the government’s planning, The A.P. said.
But he conceded the main criticism of Syrian activists, that the mission has been powerless to stop the bloodshed. Although the tanks had been withdrawn, he said, snipers persisted.
Syrian activists say more than 150 people have been killed since the monitors arrived last week. On Sunday, an Arab League advisory body, the 88-member Arab Parliament, called for the group to leave because the government was continuing to kill its opponents.
Given General Dabi’s biography, the activists have been skeptical of the mission from the start.
Originally from the town of Berber in northern Sudan, General Dabi, 63, graduated from military college in Sudan in 1969, according to a résumé he provided to journalists after his selection.
For decades, he played a forceful if quiet role in the government of President Omar Hassan al-Bashir. He was a member of a trusted inner circle who rose to power immediately after the 1989 coup that brought Mr. Bashir to power. Time and again, the president picked General Dabi for important security posts, often overseeing counterinsurgency campaigns or clampdowns on dissidents.
His first post in the Bashir government was as head of military intelligence. His name was rarely in the news, but reports by Amnesty International from the early 1990s document the role that military intelligence agents played in executions, torture and disappearances as the government fought insurgents in southern Sudan. The rebels were also accused of atrocities, including executions and indiscriminate shelling of cities.
Erwin van der Borght, the director of the Africa Program for Amnesty International, said General Dabi never investigated the “widespread” allegations of atrocities.
Isma’il Kushkush contributed reporting from Khartoum, Sudan, and Hwaida Saad from Beirut.
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