‘Massacre’ as regime forces shell Syria town

A Free Syrian Army fighter takes up a position as he points his weapon in Aleppo’s Salaheddine neighbourhood yesterday.AFP/DamascusDeadly violence raged across Syria yesterday as regime shelling killed at least 18 civilians in the northwest while 28 rebels died in Damascus battling government forces, a monitoring group said. The latest bloodshed came as Deputy Prime Minister Qadri Jamil was due to travel today to Moscow for talks with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on ways of ending the 28-month conflict. At total of at least 82 people were killed in violence across Syria yesterday, said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights which relies on a network of activists and medics for its information. The deadly shelling of Ariha by regime forces in the northwestern province of Idlib also left dozens wounded, said the Observatory, as activists denounced a “massacre” in a video posted online that showed people carrying corpses and bloodied body parts. Observatory chief Rami Abdel Rahman said regime forces opened fire on the main market in central Ariha from positions they control on the edges of town. It was not immediately clear what triggered the shelling, but rebels control part of Ariha while regime forces man three checkpoints inside the town. The Observatory said clashes had erupted in Ariha over the week, as rebels try to expand their control over the town. In the northeast Damascus flashpoint area of Adra, fierce fighting at dawn between rebels and government troops killed 28 insurgents and a member of the elite Republican Guards, Abdel Rahman said. Adra is an entry point to the capital’s Abbasiyeen Square, the target of several rebel attacks in recent months. State news agency Sana said the army “captured several terrorists from (the Islamist) Al Nusra Front, some of them foreign nationals”, west of Adra. Further north, the battle for Syria’s second city and commercial hub Aleppo entered its second year with fighting raging around the city’s international airport and nearby Nairab air base, said the Britain-based Observatory. The violence in Aleppo comes a year after a massive rebel advance on the city, where both sides have been mired in a stalemate which insurgents have tried to break by infiltrating the regime-held Rashidin district. Over the past year, insurgents have also fought to take Aleppo’s airports, aiming to stop regime warplanes from bombing rebel areas. The city’s international airport has been closed since January. Tens of thousands of Aleppo residents have fled the fighting which has badly damaged one of the Middle East’s richest cities in terms of culture and history. The Observatory also reported deadly violence yesterday in the rebel-held village of Suran, in the central province of Hama, where seven civilians were killed in shelling. It also said that six people were killed in the southern Damascus district of Yarmuk while the opposition National Coalition claimed regime forces had used “chemical weapons” in shelling Yarmuk. Activists in Suran said all seven victims in Hama were members of the same family who had taken shelter in a makeshift shelter. Thirteen other family members, six of them children, were also killed in the Mediterranean coastal town of Bayda—itself the scene of a massacre in May—and their bodies found yesterday, the Observatory said.