Forces loyal to Syria’s President Bashar Al Assad carry their weapons as they move during an operation to push rebels from the road between Dahra Abd Rabbo village and Castello in Aleppo, yesterday.
BEIRUT: Heavy fighting raged around the strategic Syrian border town of Qusair and the capital Damascus yesterday and further reports surfaced of chemical weapons attacks by President Bashar Al Assad’s forces on rebel areas.
The Syrian military pounded eastern suburbs of Damascus with air strikes and artillery and loud explosions echoed around al-Nabak, 80km north of the capital, where fighting has cut the highway running north to the central city of Homs, the pro-opposition Syrian Observatory for Human Rights group said.
Government offensives in recent weeks are widely seen as a campaign to strengthen Assad’s negotiating position before a proposed international peace conference sponsored by the United States and Russia.
Opposition activists said Syrian troops backed by Lebanese Hezbollah fighters were pressing a sustained assault on Qusair, a town long used by insurgents as a way station for arms and other supplies from Lebanon.
For Assad, Qusair is a crucial link between Damascus and loyalist strongholds on the Mediterranean coast. Recapturing the town, in central Homs province, could also sever connections between rebel-held areas in the north and south of Syria.
Hezbollah’s deepening involvement in Qusair has raised fears of renewed civil war in neighbouring Lebanon, where two rockets hit the Shia movement’s stronghold in south Beirut on Sunday and one was fired from south Lebanon towards Israel. The rockets struck hours after Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah promised that his anti-Israel guerrillas, fighting alongside Assad’s forces, would win whatever the cost.
A Lebanese security source said another 107mm rocket, which did not go off, had been aimed at Beirut airport. The launch sites were near Aitat, in the hills just south of the capital. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon voiced “deep concern” overnight at Hezbollah’s admitted combat role and the risk that the Syrian conflict will spill into Lebanon and other neighbouring states.
Ban urged all concerned “immediately to cease supporting the violence inside Syria and instead to use their influence to promote a political solution to Syria’s tragedy”. The diplomacy so far appears only to have intensified the violence, especially around Qusair and Damascus.
In Harasta, an eastern Damascus suburb largely under rebel control, dozens of people were suffering the effects of an apparent overnight chemical attack, according to opposition sources. Video showed victims lying on the floor of a large room, breathing from oxygen masks.
The sides in the conflict, now in its third year, have accused each other of using chemical weapons. France’s Le Monde newspaper published first-hand accounts yesterday of apparent chemical attacks by Assad’s forces in April.
The newspaper said one of its photographers had suffered blurred vision and respiratory difficulties for four days after an attack on April 13 on the Jobar front, in central Damascus.
Another video from Harasta overnight showed at least two fighters being put into a van, their eyes watering and struggling to breathe while medics put tubes into their throats. It was not possible to verify the videos independently, given the difficulties of media access in Syria. A doctor interviewed in another video said the alleged chemical attack in Harasta was revenge for a rebel raid on nearby military checkpoints. He complained of a severe shortage in staff and medical supplies to treat “dozens of wounded”.
Syria, which is not a member of the anti-chemical weapons convention, is believed to have one of the world’s last remaining stockpiles of undeclared chemical arms. Iran will host tomorrow an international forum to help find a “political solution” for the conflict in ally Syria, the foreign ministry said, as France, the United States and Russia push for their own peace conference. “More than 40 countries and a representative of former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan are expected to attend,” deputy foreign minister, Hossein Amir Abdollahian, told Al Alam Arabic-language television.
Reuters/AFP
