BEIRUT: More than 60 people were killed in a regime air strike on a bakery in a rebel-held town yesterday, monitors said, as peace envoy Lakhdar Brahimi launched a new bid to resolve Syria’s brutal 21-month conflict.
In one of the deadliest incidents of the conflict, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the strike hit a bakery in Halfaya in the central province of Hama, where a crowd was queuing for bread, killing more than 60 people and wounding at least 50.
Syrian rebels have seized a military base in the country’s north, capturing weapons they hope will repel air raids by President Bashar Al Assad’s forces, rebels said yesterday. Under cover of rain and fog, Col Anas Ibrahim Abu Zeid led 200 fighters in a four-hour operation to take over the 135 Infantry Brigade base in the village of Hawa, a mostly Kurdish area in northern Aleppo province, on Saturday, they said, as they showed the base to journalists.
The rebels found about 150 soldiers at the base, though it can hold up to 3,000 troops, Abu Zeid said. Between 10-15 soldiers were taken prisoner, he said. They would not say what happened to the other troops, although a Reuters journalist saw at least one corpse. The rebels said they lost six of their men.
The weapons were hidden in secret locations in Aleppo’s countryside, where the majority of the rebels fighting in this part of the country are from. At a warehouse in a residential area down a narrow street, rebels showed off two .57mm field guns and three 14-1/2 mm anti-aircraft guns.
Activists say more than 44,000 people have been killed in the 21 months since protests erupted against President Bashar Al Assad, inspired by the Arab Spring revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere. Amid the latest carnage, United Nations-backed crisis mediator Lakhdar Brahimi arrived for more talks in Syria. He had to drive from neighbouring Lebanon because fighting around Damascus International Airport has effectively shut it down.
The prising has grown into civil war, with death tolls regularly topping 100 people a day as the army hits back at rebels who have made a string of advances across the country, including around the capital. In defiant remarks, Syrian Information Minister Umran Ahid Al Za’bi said rebels and their foreign allies should “forget” trying to topple Assad.
He appeared to move away from the conciliatory tone of the Syrian vice president, who said neither side could win the war and called for a national unity government.“These military efforts to try to topple the government, of getting rid of the president, of occupying the capital ... Forget about this,” Al Za’bi told a news conference in Damascus.
Brahimi, who replaced Kofi Annan after the former UN chief failed to get Assad and world powers to agree on a way to end the conflict, was expected to meet the president on Monday.
Witness Hamawi said more than 1,000 people had been queuing at the bakery. Shortages of fuel and flour have made bread production erratic across the country, and people often wait hours to buy loaves.
“We hadn’t received flour in around three days so everyone was going to the bakery today, and lots of them were women and children,” Hamawi said. “I still don’t know yet if my relatives are among the dead.”
New York-based Human Rights Watch condemned army air strikes on bakeries earlier this year, arguing that in some incidents the Syrian military was not using enough precision to target rebel sites, and in other instances it may have intentionally hit civilians. In video from the attack site, women and children cried and screamed as men rushed with motorbikes and vans to carry away victims. Reuters /AFP
