The U.S. State Department is kicking out Syria’s top diplomat to Washington, joining several other countries in expelling Syrian officials in a bid to increase pressure on leader Bashar Assad after recent civilian killings.

Fox News confirms that the State Department has told Syria’s charge d’affaires to leave.

Officials from a series of countries, including France, Britain and Australia, also said Tuesday that they were expelling Syrian diplomats.

The killings Friday in Houla, a collection of farming villages in Syria’s Homs province, were one of the deadliest single events in the 15-month-old uprising against Assad’s rule.

The U.N. said 49 children and 34 women were among the 108 people killed.

French President Francois Hollande told reporters Tuesday that Ambassador Lamia Shakkour will be notified “today or tomorrow” that she must leave.

Hollande said that after high-level discussions with British Prime Minister David Cameron and U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, it had been decided to deploy “a certain number of … pressure tactics,” against Syria, including the expulsion of the ambassador.

Phones at Syria’s Embassy in Paris were not being answered Tuesday.

British officials said Tuesday that the U.K. is expelling three Syrian diplomats in protest at the killings, among them Charge d’Affaires Ghassan Dalla — the country’s top ranking diplomat in London. The officials demanded anonymity because they said they were not allowed to discuss the action ahead of a planned public statement from Foreign Secretary William Hague.

Hague confirmed that the United States, Canada, Germany, Spain, France, Italy and Australia were all taking action to expel the diplomats.

The ambassador to Germany, Radwan Loutfi, was given 72 hours to leave Germany on Tuesday.

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