Deadly Syrian airstrike closes hospital in Aleppo

— Airstrikes by the Syrian government damaged a hospital in the northern city of Aleppo early Thursday and flattened a building next to it, killing at least 15 people and leaving as many as 40 missing in an attack that closed one of the city’s few functioning medical facilities, anti-government activists said.

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Uprising in Syria

Video purporting to depict the aftermath showed the facade shorn off the first three stories of the hospital, with its name, Dar al-Shifa, in red letters on its tower. Beside it, another building was reduced to a two-story pile of rubble. People milled in the street, shouting, “God is great.”

Among the 15 people confirmed dead were two hospital workers and two children, said Abu Louai al-Halabi, an activist in Aleppo, adding that up to 40 people were still believed to be trapped under the rubble. One man was pulled out alive several hours after the explosion, according to another video posted on the Internet by opponents of President Bashar Assad.

Rebels seized a military base in southeastern Syria, giving them control of a swath of oil-producing territory, and tensions increased between anti-government fighters and Kurdish groups in northeastern Syria. In both areas, near the border with Iraq, activists said that fighters from Al Nusra Front for the Peopleof the Levant, a jihadi group, were taking a prominent role among the opposition fighters.

The developments came a day after a well-known antigovernment activist was arrested during a bold protest that showed that the nonviolent opposition movement is still struggling to survive even as civil war deepens.

In the old market in central Damascus, the activist, Rima Dali, raised a banner calling for “the end of all military operations” - an act of extraordinary defiance during a time of tight security and surveillance in the capital.

Dali and three other women stood in wedding dresses in the middle of the arched Souk al-Hamediya, usually bustling with spice sellers but apparently nearly empty. Photographs were posted on Dali’s and other activists’ sites.

“Syria is for all of us,” the banners read. “You are tired and we are tired. We want to live. Another solution ...”

A video e-mailed by another activist appeared to show the women being led away by security forces.

Dali had been arrested in March for standing silently in front of the parliament building with a sign reading, “Stop the killing” and calling for “Syria for all Syrians.”

Such acts of civil disobedience have been eclipsed as the Syrian protest movement grew into a civil war that has killed more than 40,000 people, but beneath the surface tensions still ripple between rebel leaders and government opponents who favor a less violent approach.

Yet fighting raged in eastern Syria, threatening to engulf displaced people who fled there from other cities, and in the northeast, activists reported tensions between jihadist fighting groups and both pro- and anti-government Kurds.

In Ras al-Ayn, near the Turkish border in northeastern Syria, activists said clashes broke out between anti-government battalions and Kurds from the PYD, or Kurdish Democratic Union Party. That group has ties to a militant Kurdish group long backed by the Syrian government.

But the conflict was not a clear-cut one between government opponents and supporters, an Arab activist who fled to Turkey from Ras al-Ayn said in a telephone interview.

The activist, who gave only his first name, Miral, for security reasons, said that the anti-government battalions in the area did not represent the mainstream of the Syrian uprising but were jihadist battalions, including from the Nusra Front. He said they enjoyed strong logistical support from similar groups inside Iraq as well as Arab tribes that straddle the border between the two countries.

In eastern Syria, a Mc-Clatchy correspondent in the province of Deir el-Zour reported that rebels appeared to control two of the three oil fields there, siphoning light crude to burn for heat and to sell and robbing the government of key revenue.

In a video posted online, a fighter claimed that rebels had “liberated” an artillery base in Mayadeen, outside the province’s main city, capturing a tank and a tank carrier.

“I hope Assad’s booty and weapons and their money and their land will be ours, God willing,” he said, concluding with a reference to the prophet: “Our master is Muhammad, our commander forever.”

Hajj Abu Bakr, a local activist in Deir el-Zour reached through Skype, said that three battalions, including one from the Nusra Front, had taken part in seizing the artillery battalion.

He said clashes in the area had continued for 22 days, government shelling had intensified after the artillery position was captured, and that a family of six had been killed. Many families from other provinces, such as Homs, are sheltering in the area, and he said he was worried that more of the displaced would be injured.

In Damascus, two mortar shells struck the upscale neighborhood of Mazzeh during the morning rush hour Thursday. One of the shells set fire to a sixth-floor apartment in a residential building, seriously injuring one woman. The second mortar round struck and damaged the first floor in a building across the street.

The state-run SANA news agency also reported that a car bomb exploded in the Massaken Barzeh district of the capital, wounding another person.

Meanwhile, the military pounded opposition strongholds in the outskirts, activists said. In videos that were posted online by activists Thursday, mortar rounds and artillery shells can be heard landing in the suburb of Daraya. Plumes of black smoke are seen rising from behind rows of houses in a residential area, and a fire engulfs one of the buildings that was hit.

In Turkey, a teacher was injured in the chest by a bullet shot from Syria, Anatolia news agency said Thursday, citing local officials.

Authorities closed schools in the border town of Ceylanpinar until next week after the shooting, Anatolia said, citing the office of the Sanliurfa province governor. Yunus Tosun, a deputy principal, was hit by a stray bullet in the courtyard of an elementary school in Ceylanpinar and was released from a hospital after treatment, Anatolia said, citing the office.

Several Turks have been wounded or killed by stray bullets or errant Syrian shells during fighting between rebels and forces loyal to Assad. It was unclear who fired the bullet that struck Tosun.

The wounding of the teacher came a day after Turkey asked for Patriot missile-defense batteries from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Turkey may have to deploy the batteries to protect its citizens from violence spilling across the border from Syria, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said during a visit to Pakistan on Thursday, according to Anatolia.

Information for this article was contributed by Anne Barnard, Hania Mourtada and Hwaida Saad of The New York Times; by Barbara Surk, Albert Aji, Zeina Karam and Mehmet Guzel of The Associated Press and by Selcan Hacaoglu and Stepan Kravchenko of Bloomberg News.

Front Section, Pages 1 on 11/23/2012

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