Syria firefight with rebels kills 9

LITTLE ROCK — Syrian soldiers fought rebels Tuesday in a firefight that killed nine people and sent several mortar shells sailing across the border into the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.

The Israeli military said nobody was hurt in the shelling and that the spillover was believed to be accidental. But Israel filed a complaint with the United Nations peacekeeping force that patrols the tense region between Israel and Syria.

Over the course of the 18-month uprising against Syrian President Bashar Assad, violence has spilled into neighboring Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey. In July, mortar shells fell about half a mile from the Golan boundary.

Activists said Tuesday that the clashes between troops and rebels inside Syria killed at least nine people.

On Tuesday, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon demanded international action to stop the war in Syria, telling a gathering of world leaders that the conflict had become “a regional calamity with global ramifications.”

“The international community should not look the other way as violence spirals out of control,” Ban said.

President Barack Obama, also speaking at the U.N., pledged U.S. support for Syrians trying to oust Assad — “a dictator who massacres his own people.”

While Obama didn’t call for an end to the violence, he made no mention of arming the opposition and stressed the importance of ensuring “that what began with citizens demanding their rights does not end in a cycle of sectarian violence.”

Also at the United Nations, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and the U.N.’s new Syria mediator, Lakhdar Brahimi, discussed ways to unite Syria’s opposition and advance a political transition.

A senior U.S. official said the two discussed new strategies for dealing with the Assad regime.

An Israeli defense official said the military believes Tuesday’s incident in the Golan Heights was a mistake and the mortar shells were not aimed at the Jewish state. It was not the first time shells from Syria have exploded in Israel since the uprising began, the official said.

There have been concerns in Israel that the long-quiet Israel-Syria frontier area could become a new Islamist front against the Jewish state. Israel captured the Golan Heights from Syria in the 1967 Mideast war and annexed the plateau 14 years later.

Syria and Israel are bitter enemies and have fought several wars, including the 1973 war. Despite the animosity, the border with Syria has been Israel’s quietest since then.

The defense official said Israel is concerned that the border region could become as lawless and deadly as Israel’s frontier with Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula has become since the fall of longtime leader Hosni Mubarak last year.

The Israeli news site YNet quoted a resident near the border as saying the mortar shells struck an area filled with apple trees.

“All in all, there has been a lot shooting and mortars really close to the border,” Dudi Mored, resident of Kibbutz Elrom, an Israeli settlement in the Golan, told Ynet.

Although the uprising against Assad has been an unprecedented challenge to his family’s four-decades of rule, the regime has kept its grip on power. Neither side of the conflict has been able to deal a decisive blow. Activists estimate that the conflict has killed some 30,000 people since the revolt began in March 2011.

On Tuesday, several bombs went off inside a school in the Syrian capital that activists say was being used by regime forces as a security headquarters. Ambulances rushed to the area and an initial report on state media said seven people were wounded.

An amateur video posted online showed smoke billowing from several spots in an area near a major road. The narrator said: “A series of explosions shake the capital Damascus.” The authenticity of the video could not be independently confirmed.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said 20 people were wounded, some of them seriously, in several blasts at the school. It said most of the wounded were members of the military.

Also Tuesday, Syrian rebels released Lebanese citizen Awad Ibrahim, who was one of 11 Shiite Muslim pilgrims abducted in May shortly after entering Syria from Turkey on their way to Lebanon, the Lebanese state-run National News Agency reported.

Ibrahim, who crossed into Turkey on Tuesday afternoon and expected to fly home later, is the second to be released. The other nine are still being held in northern Syria.

In Jordan, dozens of Syrian refugees angry over harsh living conditions in their desert tent camp clashed with Jordanian police, hurling stones and smashing charity offices and a hospital, officials and refugees said Tuesday.

Information for this article was contributed by Daniel Estrin, Ian Deitch, Jamal Halaby, Bradley Klapper and Edith M. Lederer of The Associated Press.