ALEPPO/newyork: Regime aircraft and artillery yesterday pounded rebel positions in Syria, killing at least seven children, as UN-Arab League peace envoy Lakhdar Brahimi told the UN Security Council that the civil war is worsening.
Brahimi said he sees no immediate prospect for an end to the Syrian civil war. “There is no prospect for today or tomorrow to move forward,” Brahimi told reporters after briefing the UN Security Council on his recent talks with Syria’s President Bashar Al Assad.
Brahimi said he had told Assad and others in Syria that there had to be “change” but acknowledged that for the moment there was a “stalemate” and he had no full peace plan to offer.
“There is no disagreement anywhere that the situation in Syria is extremely bad and getting worse, that it is a threat to the region and a threat to peace and security in the world,” Brahimi said. The envoy, who took over from Kofi Annan as international envoy on September 1, also appealed to the divided 15-nation Security Council for united backing for his efforts.
“If I do not represent the entire council then I am nothing,” Brahimi said.
Aircraft flattened a residential building in the northern city of Aleppo, killing a family of five, including three children, while two other youths died in other violence, said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
It reported that at least 60 people were killed across the country yesterday - 31 civilians, 22 soldiers and seven rebels - a day after at least 82 people died.
Brahimi told the 15-nation Security Council that the violence was spreading in Syria where food shortages were also more acute, envoys at the closed meeting said.
He said the Syrian government estimates that 5,000 foreign fighters are in the country.
Brahimi also told the council that the torture of detainees had become “routine” and that people were now afraid to go to hospitals which were in the hands of government forces.
The envoy estimated that 1.5 million people have fled their homes and said Syria faces growing food shortages because harvests have been slashed by the 18-month conflict.
The rebels have captured hundreds of kilometres (miles) of territory in the country’s north in the past six months, a correspondent who visited the area in March reported.
“The army is unable to control the ground, so it tries to stay in power by dominating the skies,” Syrian Observatory for Human Rights director Rami Abdel Rahman said.
The latest lethal air attack killed five people, including three children, when warplanes struck in Aleppo, the country’s commercial hub where troops and rebels have been locked in fierce fighting since mid-July.
“Three children from the same family were killed when their building collapsed in Maadi district, which is located in the Old City of Aleppo, 600 metres (yards) from the citadel,” Abdel Rahman said. “There are still people buried under the rubble.”
Videos posted to YouTube by activists, which AFP was unable to authenticate immediately, showed a mountain of rubble and men trying to clear away slabs of debris to free trapped residents.
A girl was was killed in heavy shelling of Aleppo’s northern neighbourhood of Sheikh Maqsud where several homes were destroyed, and another died in shelling in Aleppo province, the Britain-based Observatory said.
And a five-year old child was killed by gunfire in the town of Dael, in the southern province of Daraa, where the revolt against Assad’s rule erupted in March 2011, while the seventh child died in shelling on the central town of Quseir.
Yesterday’s violence comes a day after regime aircraft hammered rebels who said they now control most of Syria and have moved their command centre from Turkey to “liberated areas” inside the country.
Meanwhile Syrian opposition groups tolerated by the Damascus regime have called on both the military and rebels to stop the violence immediately, at the end of a meeting in the Syrian capital on Sunday.
The group also urged Brahimi to organise an international conference of all concerned parties to push for a democratic transition in the country.
“The regime adopted a security and military solution in response to the people’s revolution and their demands for freedom and democracy, and that has generated violence,” the opposition groups said.AFP
