A handout picture released by the Syrian Arab News Agency yesterday shows Syrian President Bashar Al Assad talking with Syrian army soldiers during a visit in Daraya, southwestern of the capital Damascus.
BEIRUT: Syrian President Bashar Al Assad said yesterday he was confident of victory against rebels and made a symbolic visit to a town once overrun by insurgents but now mostly retaken by his army.
The visit to the battered town of Daraya, southwest of Damascus, and a defiant speech illustrate the confidence of a president who is taking the upper hand in a conflict two years after many Syrians believed he was about to be toppled.
“If we were not sure that we were going to win in Syria, we would not have the ability to resist and the ability to continue fighting for more than two years against the enemy,” Assad was quoted as saying by state news agency SANA.
Insurgents have seized large swathes of territory, but Assad’s forces have staged a counter-offensive in recent weeks, pushing them back from around the capital Damascus and retaking several towns near the border with Lebanon.
Assad has framed the revolt against four decades of his family’s rule as a foreign-backed conspiracy fought by Islamist “terrorists”. When pro-democracy protests started in March 2011, a military crackdown eventually led to an armed insurrection.
Rebels have used bombs and mortars to hit government-controlled areas where they are unable to push in with infantry.
A huge explosion hit the central city of Homs yesterday in a neighbourhood inhabited mainly by Alawites — the same sect as Assad — blasting a fireball hundreds of metres (yards) into the air, video posted on the Internet by opposition activists showed.
Residents in the area said the explosion was a rebel attack on a weapons cache. One said the sound of multiple explosions could be heard for over an hour as munitions were detonated.
They said the attack hit a sports hall in the district of southeastern Wadi Al Dhahab, which the army has taken over.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an anti-Assad monitoring group, said that the blast killed at least 40 soldiers and civilians and left 120 wounded, some in a critical condition.
A rebel in Homs said that the attack was caused by a surface-to-surface “Grad” missile. He would not say which rebel group fired the missile.
Reuters cannot independently verify reports from Syria due to severe reporting and security restrictions.
UN investigators say Assad’s forces have carried out war crimes including unlawful killing, torture, sexual violence, indiscriminate attacks and pillaging in what appears to be a state-directed policy. They say rebels have also committed war crimes, including executions, but on a lesser scale.
Both sides accuse the other of using chemical weapons and — after months of diplomatic wrangling between the United Nations and Damascus over access — a chemical weapons investigation team will visit three sites where alleged attacks have occurred, the United Nations said on Wednesday.
It is hard to say if the trip will be able to establish who was behind the attacks. One attack in the northern town of Khan
Al Assal was in March and samples of Sarin gas — a fast-acting nerve agent that was originally developed in 1938 in Germany as a pesticide — can degrade very quickly, within weeks.
REUTERS
