Homs blast kills nearly 30 rebels: Nearly 30 Syrian rebels including two field commanders were killed by a huge blast in Homs Sunday, as the capital saw heavy fighting, airstrikes and a mortar attack against its heavily defended center that killed two people at the Damascus Opera House. President Bashar Assad’s forces are in firm control of the capital’s center, but rebels have been able to launch mortar and rocket attacks into downtown districts, sometimes hitting heavily secured upmarket areas and embassy grounds. “Two citizens were martyred and eight others wounded ... by mortars fired by terrorists at the opera house,” state news agency SANA said, without specifying when the attack occurred or whether the theater was in use at the time. Mortar bombs also wounded 13 people in several neighborhoods of the capital. Mortar rounds struck near the Russian Embassy Saturday, said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. The rebel fire on Damascus comes as government forces step up a campaign to crush insurgents in its eastern suburbs, it said. Another sign of the fierce fighting raging throughout the country was Saturday’s nationwide death toll, which the Observatory said stood at 295 people, of whom 230 were fighters from the various sides. The Observatory said Sunday that five civilians, including three children, were killed in regime airstrikes on the town of Douma northeast of Damascus. Six rebels were killed in clashes with government troops in the suburb of Daraya, while government troops maintained a heavy bombardment of locations in the mountainous Qalamoun region north of the capital.Warplanes also bombarded the eastern suburb of Mliha during heavy fighting with rebels, the group said. The explosion in Homs resulted from a car that exploded in the city’s chicken market, near a police base, according to the Observatory, which added that the death toll of 29 fighters was expected to rise. It was not immediately clear who carried out the blast. Anti-regime activists in the city said that a Grad rocket fired by regime forces struck a depot storing ammunition, “which was being prepared for an attempt to break the siege of Homs.” The Syrian Revolution General commission, a national network of activists, also said an ammunition depot had been struck, while state news agency SANA said a car had exploded while being loaded with explosives. The blast took place on the outskirts of the Old City of Homs, which is under rebel control. Elsewhere, government helicopters dropped barrel bombs in the northern province of Aleppo, in Deraa in the south and Latakia in the northwest, the Observatory said. Assad’s forces also shelled areas around Kasab, a village in the north of Latakia province that rebels seized late last month. Three mortar bombs fired by rebels struck the city of Latakia, causing material damage, the Observatory said. Pro-regime activist networks also reported the incident. The Observatory said an Islamist rebel group issued a warning to “Alawite” neighborhoods in the city that they would be targeted by mortar fire “for every barrel bomb” that strikes rebel-held rural areas of the province. Also near the coast, Syrian missile systems locked on to Turkish jets as they flew along the border, Turkey’s top military office was quoted as saying. The report by the Anadolu news agency said the missile systems “harassed” Turkish fighter jets, targeting them and locking on to them for 10 seconds as they flew along the border, according to a statement published on the General Staff’s website. Turkish F-16 jets were performing routine combat air patrol on the Turkey-Syria border over Hatay, the province bordering northwestern Syria, when the incident happened. In Aleppo province, the Observatory said two people, including a child, were killed in raids using explosive-packed barrel bombs, an army tactic that has caused dozens of deaths. While rebels confronted government forces across the country, rival anti-Assad groups fought one another in northeastern Hassakeh province. Late Saturday, two fighters from Al-Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate, the Nusra Front, were killed around the town of Markada during fighting with an Al-Qaeda splinter group, the Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria (ISIS), the Observatory said. It said Sunday an unspecified number of fatalities resulted from clashes in rural Aleppo between ISIS and the Kurdish YPG militia. The daily star
Posted on: Mon, 07 Apr 2014 13:24:05 +0000