BEIRUT — Rebels backed by captured tanks launched a fresh offensive on a government complex housing a police academy near the northern city of Aleppo on Sunday, while the government hit back with airstrikes to try to protect the strategic installation, activists said.
If rebels capture the complex on the outskirts of Aleppo, it would mark another setback for President Bashar Assad. In recent weeks, his regime has lost control of key infrastructure in the northeast including a hydroelectric dam, a major oil field and two army bases along the road linking Aleppo with the airport to its east.
Rebels also have been hitting the heart of Damascus with occasional mortar shells or bombings, posing a stiff challenge to the regime in its seat of power.
On Saturday, opposition fighters in the eastern province of Deir el-Zour overran a military post believed to have once been the site of a partly built nuclear reactor that Israeli warplanes bombed in 2007.
A year after the strike, the U.N. nuclear watchdog determined that the destroyed building’s size and structure fit specifications of a nuclear reactor. Syria never stated the purpose of the site known as Al-Kibar.
After the bombing, the regime carted away all the debris from the destroyed building and equipment from the two standing structures, analysts said, adding that the rebels were unlikely to have found any weapons in the abandoned complex.
Troops were in the area until this weekend. It was not clear what the site was being used for most recently.
“It’s more or less a shell because the Syrians decided to remove everything inside the buildings,” said Mustafa Alani, an analyst with the Gulf Research Center in Geneva. “I don’t think there’s anything left really of any value for the rebels.”
Separately, rebels have been trying for months to storm the government complex west of Aleppo in the suburb of Khan al-Asal, said Rami Abdul-Rahman, the director of the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
The facility also includes several smaller army outposts responsible for protecting the police academy inside the compound.
The state-run Syrian Arab News Agency said regime troops repelled the rebel attack on the police academy,inflicting heavy losses and destroying four armored vehicles and three cars fitted with machine guns. There was no word on government casualties.
Aleppo has been the scene of some of the heaviest fighting of Syria’s nearly 2-yearold conflict.
In July, rebels launched an offensive on the city, the country’s largest and onetime commercial capital, and quickly seized several neighborhoods. The battle has since devolved into a bloody stalemate, with heavy street fighting that has left whole districts in ruins and forced thousands to flee.
A key focus for the rebels as they try to capture the city is Aleppo’s international airport, which they have been attacking for weeks.
Regime forces also fired an apparent ground-to-ground missile Sunday on the town of Tal Rifat, some 20 miles north of Aleppo, the Observatory said. There was no immediate word on casualties.
The report comes after similar strikes last week on impoverished rebel-held Aleppo neighborhoods that killed at least 60 people.
Also on Sunday, prominent Syrian comedian Yassin Bakoush was killed in Damascus after apparently being caught in the crossfire between rebels and government troops. Bakoush, 75, was known for playing characters that were likable but naive and dimwitted.
SANA reported that Bakoush was killed by a rebel mortar round that landed on his car in the Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp in southern Damascus, which has been the site of heavy fighting in recent months. However, the anti-regime Observatory said Bakoush was killed when a rocket-propelled grenade launched by government forces slammed into his car.
Meanwhile, French freelance photographer Olivier Voisin, who was wounded Thursday in Syria and taken to Turkey for treatment, died of his wounds at an Istanbul hospital, the French Foreign Ministry said Sunday. Voisin was the second French journalist this year to be killed while reporting on the war.
In Lebanon, two people were killed Sunday by Syrian shells and gunfire that landed on Lebanese territory near the border.
The state-run National News Agency in Lebanon said a man was killed and his brother was wounded by shells that slammed into the town of al-Hisheh in the Wadi Khaled area of the north, while another man was killed by gunfire in the area of al-Buqaiaa.
The civil war in Syria has increasingly spilled over into Lebanon with almost daily reports of cross-border shelling or gunfire in border areas.
The United Nations has said at least 70,000 people have been killed since the uprising against Assad’s authoritarian rule began nearly two years ago. Efforts to stop the bloodshed so far have failed.
A senior opposition leader said Sunday that his umbrella group has suspended participation in meetings with its Western backers and their Arab allies because of their indifference over the regime’s attacks on the Syrian people in Aleppo and other cities.
“Assad has reached the stage of real genocide amid Arab silence and we renounce that,” George Sabra, vice president of the Syrian National Coalition, said in Cairo after meeting Arab League chief Nabil Elaraby.
On Friday, the coalition said its leaders would not travel to Washington or Moscow for any talks to protest the international community’s “silence over crimes committed by the regime.” It also said opposition leaders would boycott a meeting this week in Rome of the Friends of Syria, which includes the United States and its European allies.
In Washington, the State Department condemned rocket attacks on Aleppo, saying in a statement late Saturday that the strikes are the “latest demonstrations of the Syrian regime’s ruthlessness and its lack of compassion for the Syrian people it claims to represent.”
Meanwhile, the U.S. is trying to salvage the Rome conference, which John Kerry plans to attend Thursday during his first official overseas trip as U.S. secretary of state.
A senior Obama administration official said Sunday that Kerry sent his top Syrian envoy to Cairo in hopes of convincing opposition leaders that their participation in the conference in Rome is critical to addressing questions from potential donors and securing additional aid from the United States and Europe.
According to the official, U.S. envoy Robert Ford will say the conference is a chance for foes of Assad to make their case for new and enhanced aid and an opportunity to get to know America’s new chief diplomat, who has said he wants to propose new ideas to pressure Assad into leaving power.
The official was not authorized to discuss sensitive diplomatic matters publicly and spoke only on condition of anonymity.
Kerry is on a self-described “listening tour” of Europe and the Mideast, chiefly focused on ending the crisis in Syria. After his first stop in Britain, Kerry’s 10-day trip will take him to Germany, France, Italy, Turkey, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar. In addition to Syria, he will focus on conflicts in Mali and Afghanistan, and on Iran’s nuclear program.
Information for this article was contributed by Matthew Lee, Ryan Lucas and Lori Hinnant of The Associated Press.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 02/25/2013