Residents run fearing sniper fire in Tripoli, northern Lebanon yesterday, as death toll fuelled by sectarian tensions over Syria’s civil war rose to 10.
BEIRUT: At least 20 people, including four children, were killed yesterday in a second day of deadly air strikes on Al Bab in northern Syria, said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. The Britain-based monitoring group said they were killed when regime helicopters dropped explosives-laden barrels on a market area of Al Bab, a day after similar attacks killed at least 26 others in the same town.
“The toll is likely to rise as dozens were wounded, some of them critically, and there are reports of victims trapped under the rubble,” said the Observatory.
The Syrian regime has regularly been accused by the opposition, foreign governments and rights groups of using so-called “barrel bombs” against civilians.
The US State Department has described the weapons as “incendiary bombs which contain flammable material that can be like napalm.”
Elsewhere, the Observatory said at least five regime forces were killed overnight in a suicide car bomb attack at a police checkpoint on the Damascus-Homs highway near the contested town of Nabuk. The group said a fighter from the jihadist Al Nusra Front carried out the attack, which came as regime forces try to gain control of Nabuk, as part of an operation to recapture the Qalamoun region.
The army has already captured the towns of Qara and Deir Attiyeh, and a Syrian security source said troops now controlled 60 percent of Nabuk, which lies further south towards the capital on the Damascus-Homs highway.
The Observatory said regime warplanes carried out air strikes on the town on Sunday, and fierce fighting continued there between rebel fighters, including jihadists, and army troops backed by a pro-regime militia and Lebanon’s Shia Hezbollah. The Syrian regime is trying to sever rebel supply routes that run through the mountainous Qalamoun region, north of Damascus, across the nearby border with Lebanon. The fighting has spread to nearby Maalula, a Christian town, that was attacked by rebel fighters in September.
Regime troops had succeeded in recapturing the centre of the town, but rebels renewed their attacks there over the weekend “in an attempt to lessen the pressure on the terrorists encircled in Nabuk,” a Syrian security source said. In Eastern Ghouta, fighting pitting rebels against troops raged on, days after opposition fighters including jihadists launched a bid to break a year-long siege there.
AFP
Sectarian clashes continue in Lebanon
TRIPOLI, Lebanon: Ten people, including a woman and an off-duty soldier, have been killed in two days of sectarian clashes in northern Lebanon linked to the war in neighbouring Syria, a security source said yesterday.
The fighting in the northern port city of Tripoli also wounded 49 people, including 11 soldiers, the source said.
Yesterday, four people were killed, two of whom were in a truck when they were shot dead by a sniper, while the third was the off-duty soldier and the last victim a woman who died of injuries sustained the previous day.
Their deaths came after a day of fierce clashes that lasted into the night, leaving six dead. .
The fighting pits residents of the city’s Alawite Jabal Mohsen district against Sunni residents of the neighbouring Bab Al Tebbaneh.
The source said fires had broken out in buildings along the dividing line between the neighbourhoods as a result of the fierce clashes during which rocket-propelled grenades were also used. Tensions between the neighbouring areas date back to Lebanon’s 1975-1990 civil war but have been exacerbated by the conflict across the border in Syria, where Alawite President Bashar Al Assad is battling a Sunni-led uprising. The Lebanese army remained deployed in the coastal city in the north of the country on Sunday, responding to sporadic sniper fire.AFP
