Army shells districts on outskirts of Damascus

SYRIAN TROOPS were reported to have shelled areas south of the ring road that skirts the southern edge of Damascus yesterday before moving in and conducting house-to-house searches for arms and rebels.

The neighbourhoods targeted were said to be in the Kafr Sousa and Sayyida Aisha districts. The operation’s object was, apparently, to halt rebel mortar attacks on the nearby Mezze military airport, 5km to the west.

The opposition Syrian Revolution General Commission said 43 people were killed, including 24 executed in Kafr Sousa and six in Sayyida Aisha.

In the eastern Deir al-Zor province, troops and rebels battled for control of a second military base and airfield near the town of Abu Kamal on the Iraq border.

Aleppo rebel commander Sheikh Tawfiq Abu Sleiman said 70 per cent of the inhabitants of that city support the regime.

“The countryside is with us and the city is with them,” he told the Guardian’s Martin Chulov.

The New York Times published video evidence of a 52-man rebel unit in Aleppo tricking a prisoner into being an unwitting suicide bomber. They told him he could go free by driving a vehicle to a government position. Inside the vehicle was a primed bomb which failed to explode, however, when the rebels tried to detonate it. The rebels’ conduct amounts to a war crime.

Following US president Barack Obama’s warning that Syria could face “enormous consequences” if it deployed chemical weapons in the conflict, the Russian newspaper Kommersant cited an unnamed foreign ministry official as saying Russia had been assured that “the Syrian authorities do not intend to use these weapons and are capable of keeping them under control”.

Russia regards US military action as being “entirely probable” if there is a threat of chemical weapons being deployed, the official said. The US had “firmly warned insurgents not to even come close to chemical weapons storage sites and production plants” and that “opposition groups are heeding” such orders, the official continued.

“This shows that the West can exert specific influence when [it] wants to do so.”

US state department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland dismissed the assertion by Syrian deputy prime minister Qadri Jamil that the resignation of president Bashar al-Assad could be discussed in talks between the government and opposition.

“Frankly, we didn’t see anything terribly new there,” she said.

“We still believe that the faster Assad goes, the more chance there is to quickly move on to the day after,” she added.

Mr Jamil, a Russian-educated economist, is a domestic opposition figure and head of a breakaway faction of the Syrian Communist Party.

Following meetings in Moscow, he said: “Making [Dr Assad’s] resignation a condition for dialogue effectively means closing negotiations before they begin but during negotiations there is nothing off the table including this issue.”

The Syrian authorities want “to form a government of national unity”, he said.

Meanwhile, the Russian foreign ministry has accused the West of inciting rebels to carry on with the conflict instead of seeking a negotiated settlement, while China’s official People’s Daily newspaper has said the US president was seeking a “pretext for [military] intervention”.

The domestic Syrian opposition National Co-ordination Board announced that the government had accepted its call for a ceasefire and urged rebel forces to agree.

The conflict, though, continued to spill over into Lebanon yesterday.

At least eight people were killed and 75 wounded in fighting between Sunnis and heterodox Shia Alawites in the northern port city of Tripoli.

Following clashes between gunmen in the Sunni district of Bab al-Tabbaneh and Alawite fighters in Jabal Mohsen, the Lebanese army interposed between the warring sides and attempted to impose a ceasefire.

However, gunmen continued to roam the streets and snipers remained in position on rooftops.

Prime minister Najib Mikati, who hails from the port city, urged “the people of Tripoli not to allow anyone to pull them into conflicts . . . or become fodder for other people’s battles”.

He called on the army to end “these absurd battles”.