Rebel push into Damascus raises fears

Sheik Ahmad al-Assir, a hard-line Sunni Lebanese cleric, delivers a sermon in support of Syrian rebel fighters and Syrian refugees after Friday prayers in Beirut.
Sheik Ahmad al-Assir, a hard-line Sunni Lebanese cleric, delivers a sermon in support of Syrian rebel fighters and Syrian refugees after Friday prayers in Beirut.

— Syrian rebels took their fight within a mile of the heart of Damascus on Friday, seizing army checkpoints and cutting off a key highway with a row of burning tires as they pressed their campaign for the heavily guarded capital, considered the likely endgame in the nearly 2-year-old civil war.

The clashes raised fears that Damascus, a major cultural center and one of the world’s oldest continuously inhabited cities, could fall victim to a protracted battle that would lead to the destruction seen in other major cities and trigger a mass refugee exodus into neighboring countries.

“Any attempt by the rebels to advance into central Damascus would mean the beginning of a very long fight,” said Syrian activist Rami Jarrah. “I imagine Aleppo would be a small example of what is likely to happen in Damascus.”

Aleppo, Syria’s largest urban center and main commercial hub, has been convulsed by violence since the summer, when rebels launched an offensive to take control of the city. Since then the fighting has been locked in a deadly stalemate, with the war-ravaged city carved up into government- and opposition-held strongholds.

The latest Damascus offensive, launched from the northeastern side of the city, did not appear to be coordinated with rebels on other sides of the capital, and it was unclear whether the opposition fighters would be able to hold their ground.

Previous attempts to advance on the capital have failed. The government controls movement in and out with a network of checkpoints, and rebels have failed so far to make significant inroads.

In Geneva, the U.N. refugee agency said that Syria’s conflict is now driving 5,000 people to seek safety in neighboring countries every day, reporting a surge in their numbers in January.

“This is a full-on crisis,” Adrian Edwards, a spokesman for the agency, told journalists, reporting a 25 percent increase in the number of Syrian refugees registered in the region in January.

The surge raised the total this week to 787,000, an increase of more than 50 percent since mid-December, Edwards said. The numbers now include 260,943 in Lebanon, the first country to exceed a quarter of a million Syrian refugees; 242,649 in Jordan; 177,180 in Turkey; and 84,852 in Iraq.

The refugee agency reported in late January that it was registering up to 1,800 refugees a day in Lebanon and was opening registration centers to try to cope with the influx. But its latest figures show that the flow of Syrians to Lebanon is now more than 2,500 a day, and the heavy fighting in and around Damascus, which is only about 15 miles from the Lebanese border, could send the numbers higher.

A report released Thursday by the French medical relief agency Doctors Without Borders warned that major gaps had arisen in assistance for refugees in Lebanon and that their profound humanitarian-aid needs were not being met.

Fears are also mounting over the increased risks of disease inside Syria, particularly among the more than 2 million people estimated to have been displaced by fighting, as a result of a disruption in Syria’s water supply.

KERRY: TOO MUCH KILLING

In Washington, Secretary of State John Kerry said the Obama administration is evaluating ways to reduce the bloodshed in Syria, a day after Pentagon officials revealed a rift with the White House about arming the rebels.

“There is too much killing, there’s too much violence, and we obviously want to try to find a way forward,” Kerry said Friday, without offering any details of what’s being discussed.

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, who is retiring, and Army Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in congressional testimony Thursday that they supported a plan last year to send arms to the Syrian rebels advanced by then-Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and David Petraeus, who was director of the CIA at the time.

President Barack Obama instead approved the current policy that provides humanitarian aid for civilians and nonlethal military equipment, such as communications gear, to the rebels.

In remarks at the State Department, Kerry said he doesn’t know what was discussed in the past and that “this is a new administration now, the president’s second term. I’m the new secretary of state, and we’re going forward from this point.”

“We’re taking a look at what steps, if any - diplomatic, particularly - might be able to be taken in an effort to try to reduce that violence and deal with the situation,” Kerry said, after talks with Canadian Foreign Minister John Baird.

He said “serious questions” are raised by the involvement with the rebels of terrorist groups, such as Jabhat al-Nusra and al-Qaida in Iraq, and the U.S. also is “deeply concerned” about President Bashar Assad’s stockpiles of chemical weapons.

FIGHT FOR KEY HIGHWAY

Syria’s crisis began in March 2011 with largely peaceful protests inspired by the Arab Spring revolts elsewhere in the region that toppled longtime Arab dictators. It evolved into a civil war as the opposition took up arms to fight a government crackdown on dissent.

The latest fighting in Damascus, some of the heaviest to hit the city since July, began Wednesday with rebel attacks on regime checkpoints along a key road from Damascus to northern Syria. Opposition fighters and government forces have been clashing in the area since.

On Friday, rebels shutdown the highway out of the capital for several hours, activists said.

Online videos showed a row of burning tires blocking all traffic as fighters with automatic rifles patrolled the area. Smoke rose up from a number of areas nearby, reflecting clashes and government shelling. The videos appeared genuine and corresponded to activist reports.

A spokesman for one of the opposition groups fighting in the area said the rebels sought to open a path for a future assault on the city.

“This is not the battle for Damascus. This battle is to prepare for the entry into Damascus,” he said via Skype, giving only his nickname, Abu al-Fida, for fear of reprisals.

The city is heavily fortified and activists say it is surrounded with three of the most loyal divisions of the army, including the Republican Guard and the feared 4th Division, commanded by Assad’s brother Maher.

In fighting around the capital’s main highway, one checkpoint changed hands twice on Thursday but was securely in rebel hands Friday, Abu al-Fida said. Rebels were within a mile of Abbasid Square in central Damascus and were firing mortar rounds at a military base near the landmark plaza, he said.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported Damascus area clashes in Jobar and shelling and airstrikes nearby at Zamalka and Qaboun. Rebels also battled government troops in the southern neighborhood of Yarmouk, as well as in the rebel-held suburbs of Daraya and Moadamiyeh, where six people died in government shelling, it said.

Meanwhile, dramatic footage of the shelling of a village in central Homs province Thursday showed people running and screaming in panic, carrying away children and the wounded as explosions reverberated and smoke rose from buildings. Areas in Homs were still being targeted on Friday.

BOMBING AT BUS STOP

Also Friday, the Observatory said 54 people were killed, including 11 women, in a bombing at a bus stop near a military factory earlier in the week.

Observatory director Rami Abdul-Rahman said an explosive-laden minibus blew up at a bus stop outside the factory in Buraq, near the central city of Hama, while workers were waiting for rides home. The factory makes military supplies but not weapons, he said.

The area is government controlled, which is why reports on the blast were slow to emerge.

“These people work for the Ministry of Defense, but they are all civilians,” he said, adding that no one from the military was killed in the blast.

Syria’s state news agency said “terrorists” detonated a car bomb near the factory. The regime refers to rebels fighting to topple the Assad regime as terrorists.

No one has claimed responsibility for the blast, which resembled others in recent months that appeared to target buildings associated with Syria’s military and security services.

Some of the bombings have been claimed by Jabhat al-Nusra, an al-Qaida-linked group fighting alongside the rebels. The U.S. has designated Jabhat al-Nusra a terrorist organization.

As the situation in Syria has worsened, foreign jihadists have flocked to Syria to join what they consider a holy war to replace Assad’s regime with an Islamic state.

Late Thursday, the chief of the Netherlands’ top intelligence agency warned that dozens of Dutch citizens are fighting with Syria’s rebels and could return home battle hardened and radicalized.

Information for this article was contributed by Zeina Karam, Ben Hubbard, John Heilprin and Mike Corder of The Associated Press; by Nick Cumming-Bruce of The New York Times and by Terry Atlas, Nicole Gaouette, John Walcott and Margaret Talev of Bloomberg News.

Front Section, Pages 1 on 02/09/2013

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