Turkey vows support for Syrian rebels

Envoy: Shouldn’t press for talks while Assad still rules

Syrians search through the debris of destroyed buildings on Sunday after an airstrike hit the neighborhood of Eastern Ansari in Aleppo, Syria. The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the bombardment by Syrian troops killed at least 16 people, including 10 children.
Syrians search through the debris of destroyed buildings on Sunday after an airstrike hit the neighborhood of Eastern Ansari in Aleppo, Syria. The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the bombardment by Syrian troops killed at least 16 people, including 10 children.

— Turkey pledged its continued support for the Syrian opposition on Sunday, saying its leaders should not be pressured into talks with the regime as civil war rages.

Speaking at a security conference in Germany, Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said his country supports efforts to end the bloodshed in Syria, but he understands the opposition’s refusal to talk to President Bashar Assad after so many Syrian deaths in the fight to topple him.

“It is easy to say now, [the] opposition should accept to sit with the regime, after 60,000 people have been killed,” Davutoglu said at the gathering of top diplomats and security officials in Munich.

“Assuming that tomorrow there is a new election in[Assad’s] presence, who will guarantee the safety of the opposition leaders?” Davutoglu said.

Opposition leaders reject any talks with Damascus until Assad steps down. In a sharp departure from the coalition’s resolve, coalition president Moaz al-Khatib said on Wednesday that he is willing to talk to the regime if that would help end bloodshed.

Like the United States and its Western allies, Turkey has repeatedly called on Assad to step down. Assad brushed the calls aside, outlining a peace proposal last month that would put him in charge of national reconciliation talks.

Russia, Assad’s most important international ally, said the insistence on his ouster before political talks can begin is counterproductive. Another staunch supporter of Damascus, Iran, said Tehran would welcome the opposition leaders to talks.

“Iran has talked to the opposition,” Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi said in Munich. “We are ready to be part of the solution. The sooner that we resolve the issue, the better it is.”

Salehi talked in Germany on Saturday with al-Khatib, the opposition leader, in a rare meeting between a senior Iranian official and an Assad opponent.

Al-Khatib’s recent statements in which he said he is ready to talk to regime officials have angered his colleagues in his Syrian National Coalition, which he has headed since November.

“Mouaz al-Khatib has committed a grave mistake. His duty is to represent the coalition, which categorically refuses to have any talks with any member of the regime before Bashar Assad steps down,” said Kamal Labwani, a senior member of the coalition.

“He should respect the will of the people,” Labwani said. “We expect him to apologize publicly or to step down.”

In the battlefield city of Aleppo in northern Syria, at least 16 people were killed when government troops bombed a building in a rebel held neighborhood, activists said.

In other violence in the city, the official Syrian Arab News Agency said a former member of parliament, his wife and two daughters were killed near the Aleppo airport. The report said “terrorists,” the term the Syrian government uses for rebels, fired at Ibrahim Azzouz’s car in the Sheik Said neighborhood, killing the family.

Rebels captured the strategic Sheik Said neighborhood southeast of Aleppo on Saturday, a significant blow to regime forces because the area includes the road the army has used to supply troops.

Troops loyal to Assad and rebels have been locked in a deadly stalemate in Aleppo, Syria’s largest urban center and main commercial hub, since an opposition assault last summer. Seven months later, the rebels hold large parts of the city and its outskirts, including several army bases. But they have been unable to overcome the regime’s superior firepower.

The Britain-based activist group Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which opposes the regime, said government troops bombarded a building in Aleppo’s rebel-held neighborhood of Ansari on Sunday and killed at least 16 people, including 10 children.

The Aleppo Media Center, a network of anti-regime activists in the city, said 20 people were killed in the shelling of Ansari.

Elsewhere on Sunday, officials said clashes broke out over tent distribution in a Jordanian camp for Syrian refugees as winter storms and icy temperatures worsened already harsh living conditions there.

Refugee affairs spokesman Anmar Hmud said Syrian refugees fought each other, and one was slightly injured. They also tried to attack Jordanian riot police who were guarding the Zaatari camp Sunday as tents donated by a Norwegian charity were distributed. He said the police fired tear gas to disperse the crowd.

Rioting by refugees has become a recurring problem in the camp, which houses about 70,000 of the 320,000 Syrian refugees who fled to Jordan because of the civil war.

Also Sunday, Israel’s defense minister strongly signaled that his country was behind an airstrike in Syria last week, telling a high-profile security conference that Israeli threats to take pre-emptive action against its enemies are not empty. “We mean it,” Ehud Barak declared.

For years, Israel has said Assad and Iran have been arming the militant group Hezbollah, which fought a month-long war against Israel in 2006.

U.S. officials said the main target was a convoy of sophisticated Russian SA-17 anti-aircraft missiles. Deployed by Hezbollah in Lebanon, they could have limited Israel’s ability to gather intelligence on its enemies from the air.

However, U.S. officials who are sorting through intelligence reports said Sunday that the strike also appeared to have damaged the country’s main research center for work on biological and chemical weapons.

That complex, the Syrian Scientific Studies and Research Center, has been the target of U.S. and Western sanctions for more than a decade because of intelligence suggesting that it was the training site for engineers who worked on chemical and biological weaponry.

A senior U.S. military official, asked about reports that the research center had been damaged, said: “My sense is that the buildings were destroyed due to the bombs which targeted the vehicles” carrying the anti-aircraft weapons, and from “the secondary explosions from the missiles.”

The official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that “the Israelis had a small strike package,” meaning that a relatively few fighter aircraft slipped past Syria’s air defenses and that targeting both the missiles and the research center “would risk doing just a little damage to either.”

“They clearly went after the air-defense weapons on the transport trucks,” the official said.

There is still much that is not known about the attack, and there have been contradictory descriptions of it since it was carried out. Initial reports suggested that the anti-aircraft missiles were hit near the Lebanese border, but subsequent reports suggested there were multiple attacks conducted at roughly the same time.

Israel has not officially confirmed its planes attacked the site near Damascus.

Information for this article was contributed by Barbara Surk, Bassem Mroue, Geir Moulson, David Rising Josef Federman, Ian Deitch and Christopher Torchia of The Associated Press and by David E. Sanger, Eric Schmitt, Jodi Rudoren and Steven Erlanger of The New York Times.

Front Section, Pages 1 on 02/04/2013

Upcoming Events