34 die as Syria forces pound rebel bastions

At least 34 people, including 16 civilians, were killed yesterday as Syrian forces pressed their crackdown on dissent, pounding rebel bastions and clashing with insurgents near the Turkish border, monitors said. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights also charged that the army was torching and looting rebel houses across the country in a deliberate campaign that could amount to crimes against humanity. “Two civilians and five rebels were killed by gunfire and shrapnel in an offensive launched this morning in the village of Hass,” in Idlib province, said the Britain-based Observatory. Troops set fire to the houses of residents who had fled and arrested dozens, it added. “We have identified cases of burnt houses belonging to militants, or soldiers who deserted, in Daraa, Homs, and in the provinces of Idlib and Hama,” said Rami Abdel Rahman, who heads the monitoring group. This “deliberate policy has been applied daily for more than three months”, he added. Government troops have also carried out theft and looting, as “a kind of collective punishment, which could amount to crimes against humanity”. The official Sana news agency, meanwhile, said the authorities had foiled an attempt by “terrorists” to cross the border from Turkey, adding that one was killed and the others fled. Also in Idlib, at least one soldier was killed in fighting with rebels in the village of Khirbet Al Joze, and another in Khan Sheikhun, while a woman died by gunfire in Kafruma. Two other Idlib villages, Deir Subol and Farkia, were also targeted by troops in an operation in which a 16-year-old boy was killed and three other people injured, the Observatory said. The villages came under heavy gunfire, activist Nureddin Abdo said, adding that forces backed by tanks stormed the town of Al Maghara, also “raiding houses, burning some of them and arresting youths”. In the city of Homs, one of the main targets of the regime’s year-long crackdown, five civilians were reportedly killed, along with two rebel fighters and four soldiers, while another three civilians were killed in the nearby town of Qusayr and one in Rastan. Also yesterday, a civilian was killed in an explosion in Aleppo, Syria’s second city, where clashes left two rebels and a soldier dead. Bombings have hit Syria’s major cities in recent months, provoking mounting concern that Al Qaeda has taken advantage of the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad. In Damascus, a blast ripped through the city centre near a hotel and a police station, injuring some people and damaging shops, official Syrian television Al Ikhbariya and witnesses said. “A bomb exploded loudly near the Hotel Kinda” in busy Marja neighbourhood in the centre of the capital, the television channel said. “Four people were slightly hurt and shops damaged.” Witnesses said the explosion occurred near a police station, and that the area had been cordoned off, with ambulances seen at the site of the blast. Elsewhere in Damascus province, a civilian was reportedly shot dead at an army checkpoint and another killed during military searches in the central Hama region. In Daraa, cradle of the uprising, forces carried out arrest raids in the town of Dael, where two houses were burnt and a third collapsed, said the Observatory and the Local Co-ordination Committees activist group. In the same region, army deserters fired rocket-propelled grenades at checkpoints at Inkhel, killing two soldiers, while gunfire was heard in the Tafas village. The latest violence comes a day after Western and Arab nations called for Assad to be given a deadline to meet the terms of a peace plan crafted by UN-Arab League envoy Kofi Annan. The crackdown in Syria has killed more than 10,000 people since the uprising against Assad’s regime erupted last March, Abdel Rahman said yesterday, with 7,306 civilians among the dead. UN estimates put the toll at more than 9,000. Draconian restrictions placed on journalists in Syria make the figures impossible to verify.