A man carries the remains of a missile fired by a Syrian Air Force fighter jet, at the souq of Azaz, north of Aleppo, yesterday.
Damascus/Amman: Government forces killed at least 36 people, 14 of them children, in a bombardment of rebel-held areas on the outskirts of Damascus yesterday, Syrian opposition activists said.
Video footage showed women weeping over the dismembered bodies of children strewn across a field in Eastern Ghouta, near an air defence base on the edge of the town of Muleiha, 5km east of Damascus.
The air, rocket and artillery campaign is the heaviest since rebels overran a helicopter base and missile base near Damascus two months ago and encroached on the main international airport, inching steadily closer to the capital, the sources said.
Russia urged the rebels to make counter-proposals to those made by President Bashar Al Assad in a recent speech to start a dialogue that could end the fighting.
“If I were in the opposition’s shoes, I would come up with my ideas in response on how to establish a dialogue,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said yesterday. “President Assad came out with initiatives aimed at inviting all opposition members to dialogue. Yes, these initiatives probably do not go far enough. Probably they will not seem serious to some, but they are proposals,” Interfax news agency quoted Lavrov as saying.
Muleiha is the last major fortification in the area east of Damascus not yet to have fallen to the rebels. Assad’s core troops and security personnel, mostly belonging to his minority Alawite sect, are entrenched in the capital. “God is greater than you, Bashar,” one activist says in the video as a youth carries the torso of a child. At least three of the dead were women, opposition sources said.
The footage was taken by activists and could not be independently verified.
Activist Yasmine Al Shami, speaking by phone from Damascus, said residential areas around Muleiha and in the working-class suburbs of Hazzeh, Kfar Batna and Douma were being heavily hit.
“The regime has gone mad with bombardment today. Footage that has been coming in is heartbreaking. Among the dead is a mother, Heba al-Lahham, and her three children, who were playing in a field in Hazzeh,” she said.
A report by the opposition Damascus Media Centre said rebels had been attacking the Muleiha base with rocket-propelled grenades and mortars for five days, and the army had fired over 600 rockets on the town in response.
“The base has a large numbers of tanks and armour and stockpiles of ammunition. There is information that the Free Syrian Army has destroyed five tanks and one armoured vehicle,” the report said.
A member of the group said Assad’s forces were pounding civilian areas to try to weaken support for the rebels.
“This is the last base standing in the east between the rebels and Damascus. It is a huge compound and the regime is bombarding heavily to keep the rebels from mounting a concerted offensive to take it over,” he said.
A commander in Liwa al-Islam, one of several rebel brigades fighting in the area, said the compound was well defended.
“Our objective is to take it, but it will not be immediate,” he said.
An Arab League delegation is to visit Syria’s neighbouring countries to assess the status of refugees ahead of a donor conference in Kuwait on January 30, the pan-Arab body said yesterday.
Arab foreign ministers meeting in Cairo to discuss the Syrian refugee crisis agreed to send a team to Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq “to assess the situation of Syrian refugees on the ground,” the Arab League said.
The delegation is to work out the amount of aid required and present its findings to a donor conference to be hosted by Kuwait on January 30, it said.
The number of Syrian refugees registered in neighbouring countries and North Africa has jumped by more than 100,000 in the past month to over 600,000, the UN’s refugee body said on Friday.
Official media in Syria renewed attacks on UN and Arab League envoy Lakhdar Brahimi yesterday, calling him biased and saying his peace mission aimed at solving the country’s crisis was “useless.”
On Wednesday, Brahimi criticised as “one-sided” a proposal by President Bashar Al Assad to end the crisis, and two days later he met top US and Russian officials and urged “a speedy end to the bloodshed” in the strife-torn country. “It is clear that Brahimi is now out of the loop for the solution for Syria. He has taken sides, he is not a mediator,” wrote the pro-regime daily Al Watan on yesterday’s front page.
“Brahimi is incapable of finding a solution to the Syrian crisis.
“He acknowledged in his last meeting with President Assad (on December 24) that Turkey and Qatar will not stop supporting terrorist groups and that he cannot prevent them from doing so,” it wrote. “Brahimi’s mission is useless, just like (his predecessor) Kofi Annan, who resigned when he realised that he had no role to play in a war waged against Syria by several Western capitals,” said AlWatan.reuters/AFP
