Bomb explodes in central Damascus, injuring 11

BEIRUT--A bomb exploded Sunday near the offices of a trade union in central Damascus, injuring 11 people, state media reported.

The official Syrian news service blamed “terrorists,” its usual label for armed rebels seeking the overthrow of President Bashar Assad.

The target of the attack was not immediately clear. The district where the bomb exploded is also home to a hotel and several security installations. Initial reports included no confirmation of fatalities.

The attack once again seemed to demonstrate rebels’ ability to strike at the heart of the Syrian capital, despite heavy security and a plethora of checkpoints throughout Damascus.

Rebels appear to be stepping up bomb attacks in and around the Syrian capital, where a number of car bombs and other blasts have exploded in recent weeks. The string of bombings comes as Syrian troops have pushed many armed rebels out of city neighborhoods and into outlying districts.

The apparent opposition bombing campaign has dramatized the capital’s vulnerability and rebels’ skill at piercing the security cordon. But the bombs have also unnerved capital residents and killed and injured many civilians. The attacks run the risk of alienating Syrians and buttressing Assad’s argument that his foes are foreign-backed “terrorists,” not democracy-seeking revolutionaries.

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Photo: Site of bombing in central Damascus. Credit: EPA/STR

Israel complains about Syrian tanks along Golan Heights border

JERUSALEM –- Three Syrian tanks entered a demilitarized zone Saturday afternoon along the border with the Golan Heights, spurring Israel to file a complaint with the United Nations, Israeli officials said.

Although the tanks did not enter the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, Israel officials said the Syrian military presence is restricted from the border area under a U.N.-monitored cease-fire agreement.
The Syrian tanks were battling Syrian rebel forces when the fighting moved into the demilitarized area, Israeli media reported.

Israeli officials said they did not view the tanks as a provocation or an attempt to draw Israel into the fighting in Syria, where an uprising against President Bashar Assad has devolved into a civil war.

It’s not the first time violence from Syria’s war has drifted into the Golan Heights. In September, errant mortars struck the region.

Israel captured the Golan Heights in the 1967 Middle East War and announced in 1981 that it was annexing the region, though the move was not recognized by the international community.

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-- Edmund Sanders

U.N.: Reported execution by Syrian rebels could be war crime

BEIRUT -- The apparent summary execution of at least eight Syrian government soldiers by Syrian rebels documented on amateur video “looks very like a war crime,” a United Nations human rights official said Friday.

Rupert Colville, spokesman for the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, said the video may capture an instance of extra-judicial execution. If verified, he said, the video could be used as evidence in a war-crimes prosecution.

“Unfortunately, this could be the latest in a string of documented summary executions by opposition factions as well as by government forces and groups affiliated with them,” Colville told reporters in Geneva. “The allegations are that these were soldiers who were no longer combatants and therefore, at this point, it looks very like a war crime.”

The video, uploaded on the Internet on Thursday, appears to show rebels training their rifles and firing on at least eight  government soldiers captured at a checkpoint in Syria’s northern Idlib province. Before the shooting barrage, some captives begged for mercy as the rebels kicked them and denounced them as “dogs” of Syrian President Bashar Assad, whom the rebels seek to overthrow. The video has not been independently verified.

Human rights groups have said that anyone from either side of Syria's bloody conflict found responsible for executing prisoners or other battlefield offenses could face a judicial reckoning at some point.

“The people committing these crimes should be under no illusion that they will escape accountability,” Colville warned, “because there is a lot of accumulated evidence, perhaps including this video.”

Accounts of alleged rebel atrocities and the use of car bombs and other explosives in civilian areas, along with the arrival in Syria of Islamist militants from other nations, have for some tarnished the “freedom fighter” image that opposition representatives have sought to project to the world. The reports have complicated opposition efforts to garner more aid from the West and elsewhere.

This week Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton urged the leadership of the Syrian opposition to be “on record strongly resisting the efforts by extremists to hijack the Syrian revolution.”

Meanwhile, the official Syrian news agency reported Friday that "terrorists"--the government's customary description of armed rebels-- detonated a pair of bombs hidden inside a car parked near Damascus'  al-Zahera Park, leaving 16 people injured. No fatalities were reported.

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Deadly Syrian stalemate spurs new diplomacy, little hope

Galvanized by a Syrian death toll that has doubled to 36,000 in little more than a month, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has called for a new rebel hierarchy to direct the fighting against President Bashar Assad and steer Syria back to peaceful ethnic and religious coexistence.

The latest proposal for halting Syria's 19-month-old civil war brings little new strategy to the crisis. Rather, it vents frustration with the international community’s own "divisions, dysfunctionality and powerlessness," as the International Crisis Group recently noted, that have prevented brokering an end to the bloodshed.

Like European leaders before her, Clinton acknowledged this week that the West’s reliance on out-of-touch exiles within the Paris-based Syrian National Council has done more harm than good in the effort to have opposition forces speak with one voice on their plans for a post-Assad future.

Clinton told reporters accompanying her on a trip to North Africa and the Balkans on Wednesday that the Obama administration will be suggesting names and organizations it believes should play prominent roles in a reconfigured rebel alliance that Western diplomats hope to see emerge from Arab League-sponsored talks next week in the Qatari capital, Doha.

But the U.S. push to get the opposition’s act together also exudes desperation. In the two months since a failed rebel campaign to take strategic ground around major cities, fighting has ground down to a bloody impasse, giving neither Assad nor his opponents hope of imminent victory on the battlefields.

The rebels’ summer offensive also exposed the widening role of Islamic extremists who have entered the fight, bringing arms and combat experience to the side of Assad’s fractured opponents. But the Islamic militants’ alignment with Syrians trying to topple Assad also gives weight to the regime’s claims to be fighting off terrorists, not domestic political foes.

Clinton reiterated the West’s insistence that Assad have no role in Syria’s future. That prompted immediate pushback by Russia and China, which have opposed what they call foreign interference in Syrian domestic affairs.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov was in Paris for talks with his French counterpart when Clinton announced the Obama administration’s latest initiative. A longtime ally and arms supplier to Syria, Russia has blocked three United Nations Security Council resolutions to censure Assad and, along with China, has rejected Western demands that the Syrian president resign and leave the country.

"If the position of our partners remains the departure of this leader who they do not like, the bloodbath will continue," Lavrov warned.

Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi registered Beijing’s objections by unveiling a "four-point plan" for bringing peace to Syria that reiterates the communist state’s position that the future of Syria be left for Syrians -- including Assad -- to decide.

Beijing has a solid history of blocking international intervention on human rights grounds, apparently fearing China could become a target of such actions because of its harsh treatment of dissent and political opponents.

For some Middle East experts, the solution to Syria’s crisis lies somewhere between the Russian-Chinese "hands-off" policy and the U.S.-led Western view that only regime change will bring about peace.

"This conflict is for Syrians and their neighbors to resolve, with European and Russian involvement. The U.S. should stay one removed," said Ed Husain, senior fellow in Middle East studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.

He described Clinton’s appeal for a new rebel leadership structure as "laudable, but a year too late."

"She’s driven by a desire to want to help now, but also to ensure a smooth transition in a post-Assad Syria. Sadly, reality on the ground dictates otherwise,” Husain said, alluding to entrenched battles that portend a long standoff.

Growing fears that extremists are gaining clout with the rebels also complicates diplomacy, as Syria’s Shiite, Christian, Kurdish and other minority sects are wary of how they would fare under a Sunni-dominated government allied with fundamentalist jihadis.

Clinton emphasized that extremist forces should be excluded from any new opposition forum that might emerge from Doha.

"It may seem ironic to call for a broad tent and then say 'except for those guys.' But I think the administration and other countries concerned about the future of Syria know that one of the challenges will be to have an analysis of who is who in the opposition,” said Charles Ries, a career U.S. diplomat now heading Rand Corp.’s Center for Middle East Public Policy.

Ries sees the need for "more movement on the ground in Syria" before Assad or the rebels are ready to submit to negotiations on the country’s future.

He is hesitant to declare the civil war a stalemate or the Russian-Chinese position unchangeable in the long run. But with rebels pinned down in the urban areas they hold and warding off attacks by Assad’s superior armed forces, he said, no one seems to think Assad is in the kind of imminent danger of being ousted that would be the catalyst for negotiation and compromise.

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Photo: A Syrian rebel fighter last month defends territory near Aleppo, one of many urban battlegrounds the opponents of President Bashar Assad are now struggling to hold. Credit: Zac Baillie / AFP/Getty Images

Clinton discloses West's effort to help reshape Syria opposition

WASHINGTON -- The Obama administration and allies have begun a new effort to reshape the Syrian opposition to give a bigger role to front-line fighters, a smaller one to Syrian exiles, and to exclude entirely the Islamist radicals who have flocked to the war against the government of President Bashar Assad, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Wednesday.

Speaking to reporters in Croatia, Clinton said the U.S. and allies hope to take a major step in forming a future leadership of Syria at an Arab League-sponsored meeting in Qatar next week that will include a range of Syrian representatives, as well as American, European and Arab officials.

The new opposition leadership must include “a representation of those who are on the front lines, fighting and dying today to obtain their freedom,” she said in an appearance with Croatian President Ivo Josipovic. “This cannot be an opposition represented by people who have many good attributes but have, in many instances, not been inside Syria for 20, 30 or 40 years,” she said in a reference to the Paris-based Syrian National Council.

Clinton said the United States has suggested the names of groups that it believes should be included in the new order, and emphasized the U.S. view that the Syrian National Council “can no longer be viewed as the visible leader of the opposition.” The new opposition must be “on record strongly resisting the efforts by extremists to hijack the Syrian revolution,” she said.

The formation of an integrated opposition leadership has been a top goal of U.S. officials, but a frustrating one because of the deep distrust between the opposition fighters in Syria, the exiles, and minority Alawites and Christians who American officials hope to persuade to support a new government.

Clinton said she was disappointed, but not surprised, at the failure of a four-day holiday cease-fire that had been proposed by the new U.N. envoy to Syria, Lakhdar Brahimi.

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Photo: Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton arrives at Zagreb airport in Croatia on Wednesday. Credit: Pool Photo

New Damascus bomb attack kills 6 as Syrian violence escalates

BEIRUT -- A bomb exploded Wednesday near a Shiite Muslim shrine outside Damascus, the latest deadly bombing attack in and around Syria's capital.

Official state news media reported that six people were killed and 13 injured in the blast in the Sayyida Zeinab area, named after the mausoleum of the granddaughter of the Muslim prophet Muhammad.

The shrine, southeast of Damascus, is a focus of pilgrimages by Shiite Muslims from throughout the world.

Wednesday's attack was at least the second in the Sayyida Zeinab district, a working-class areas with a mixed population, including a concentration of Shiite Muslims, among them war refugees from neighboring Iraq. Some worry that the majestic shrine itself could eventually be targeted, just as mosques and shrines were bombed during the sectarian warfare in Iraq.

Human rights observers have voiced fears that Syria's 19-month old conflict is becoming more sectarian in nature. Rebels, mostly from the nation's Sunni Muslim majority, are trying to overthrow the government of President Bashar Assad, a member of the minority Alawite sect, a Shiite offshoot.

It was unclear whom Wednesday's bomb attack targeted. Media reports from Syria indicated that the bomb exploded near a vegetable market.

The official Syrian news service said the bomb was detonated in a garbage bag along a crowded street.

No one immediately claimed responsibility for the attack, as is often the case in Syria, where bombs have been detonating on public streets since December.

Despite tight security in the capital, the Damascus area has seen at least three bombings in the last 10 days, with almost two dozen people killed and scores wounded.

Recent attacks include a car bombing Monday in the Jaramana suburb, home to many Christians and Druse largely considered loyal to the government, and a blast on Sept. 21 in the Old City’s Bab Touma district, a historic Christian area.

An often-violated weekend cease-fire called for the Muslim Eid-al-Adha holiday ended on Monday, and violence has picked up throughout much of the country.

On Wednesday, opposition activists reported new government airstrikes on rebel strongholds east of the city, continuing a pattern of stepped-up aerial attacks. Rebel fighters generally lack antiaircraft weapons to counter jets and helicopters, though insurgents have reported shooting down some government aircraft.

With the weekend truce considered a failure, Lakhdar Brahimi, the United Nations/Arab League special envoy for Syria, was said to be formulating new proposals.

The veteran Algerian diplomat was in Beijing on Wednesday after an earlier visit to Moscow. China and Russia have used their positions on the U.N. Security Council to block international moves against Assad, with such efforts to resolve the Syrian crisis ending in an impasse. Brahimi is expected to present fresh ideas before the Security Council within weeks.

The Syrian conflict has so far left at least 20,000 people dead, according to independent estimates, though opposition activists have put the death toll at more than 30,000.

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Photo: A Syrian Arab News Agency image shows a father standing next to his injured daughter as she receives treatment in a hospital following a bomb attack Wednesday in the Sayyida Zeinab district outside Damascus. Credit: SANA / EPA

 

Micro-bus in Damascus reportedly hit by shell; at least 10 dead

BEIRUT -- On what was supposed to be the last day of a holiday cease-fire in Syria, a government shell struck a micro-bus in Damascus on Monday, killing at least 10 people, many of them children, activists said.

Photos and videos reportedly take at the scene in the Al-Hajar al-Aswad neighborhood showed children’s bloody bodies lined up on the ground and the injured being taken away by taxis or other buses. Government forces later raided the Palestine Hospital in the neighborhood and arrested some of the wounded, activists said.

The incident came on the final day of Eid al-Adha, the Muslim holiday that was marked by clashes and airstrikes rather than the hoped-for lull in violence. Reports of the attack could not be independently confirmed because the Syrian government restricts media access to the conflict zone.

Other opposition-held neighborhoods and suburbs also were constantly shelled on Monday, activists reported.

In the Damascus suburb of Jaramana, considered to be an area loyal to the government, state media reported that a car bomb killed at least six people and injured more than 50.

Car bombing in Damascus explodes holiday cease-fire

BEIRUT -- A car bomb exploded in the Syrian capital of Damascus on Friday evening near a square where children had been playing, disrupting what was already a shaky holiday cease-fire. Casualties were reported but it wasn’t clear immediately how many people had died.

The government and opposition traded blame for the explosion in the Zuhour neighborhood and for breaking the truce on the first day of the Eid Al-Adha holiday. Video from the blast’s immediate aftermath showed fires in the street and the fronts of several buildings blown off as residents searched for bodies.

Early reports indicated at least a dozen people had been killed.

U.N. and Arab League envoy to Syria Lakhdar Brahimi had expressed hope that the four-day cease-fire could be used to broker a lasting end to the violence in the ongoing conflict between anti-government rebels and President Bashar Assad. But even when Assad’s government announced Thursday it had agreed to the truce, few held hope that it would succeed. Previous attempts at a cease-fire have failed and the violence in Syria has only escalated. 

From the first few hours on Friday, opposition activists reported violations with shelling of several cities continuing and clashes breaking out in the northern city of Maarat Numan.

Elsewhere, many Syrians took advantage of the reduction in violence to stage anti-government demonstrations.

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Photo: Photo released by the official Syrian Arab News Agency shows Syrian President Bashar Assad, center, shaking hands with people at the end of Eid al-Adha prayers Friday at al-Afram Mosque in Damascus. Credit:  EPA / SANA

Syria clashes persist despite holiday truce

BEIRUT -– Despite the beginning of a cease-fire Friday in observance of the Eid Al-Adha holiday, there have been reports of clashes in northern Syria and shelling in various parts of the country.

Three people were killed in the Damascus suburb of Harasta, which has been under constant shelling in recent days, as shelling and sniper fire continued in the town’s streets, activists said.

In the city of Maarat Numan, which has been the site of fighting between Free Syrian Army rebels and loyalist forces for more than two weeks, government shelling began at 5 a.m. on all parts of the city, said activist Ahmad Halabi. A few hours later when regime forces began moving artillery reinforcements toward the Wadi Daif military post, clashes erupted again and are ongoing, Halabi said.

In Aleppo, activists reported that clashes didn’t stop throughout the night and shelling began early in the afternoon.

“Gunfire is coming down like rain,” one Aleppo resident said. “What kind of a cease-fire is this? And what kind of Eid is this?”

Meanwhile, anti-government protesters came out after morning Eid prayers in Aleppo, Hama, Damascus and Daraa. In some cases activists said government troops shot at the demonstrators.

On Thursday, a day after U.N. and Arab League envoy Lakhdar Brahimi announced the cease-fire, the Syrian army agreed to suspend its military operations for four days. The army said it reserved the right to respond to rebel attacks or attempts to reinforce their positions “in consistence with our responsibilities of protecting civilians.”

There was no broad consensus among rebel groups about observing the truce, with some saying they would stop fighting only if regime forces did first, while others said the government needed to release all detainees and withdraw from cities before there could be a cease-fire.

On Friday, state TV showed President Bashar Assad attending Eid prayers at a mosque in the Muhajireen neighborhood in Damascus. It was one of his rare public appearances in recent months ever since an attack in July killed some of his top security officials.

The sermon, state media reported, was a call to Syrians to solve their internal problems through reform and foil the attempts of outsiders to stir up sectarian violence.

From the beginning there was wide skepticism of the proposed cease-fire, given that past attempts to quell the fighting in Syria have failed. In April, Brahimi’s predecessor Kofi Annan brokered a cease-fire that fell apart within days, with each side blaming the other for breaking the truce.

Even though Brahimi was pessimistic about his chances for ending the conflict when he first took on the role, on Wednesday when announcing the truce he said he hoped to “build on it and aim for a lasting and solid cease-fire.” International leaders are still  holding out hope for dialogue and a political transition.

But even if the Eid truce is successful, it is unlikely to last. Rebels have said they will not negotiate with the Assad regime and the government in turn continues to refer to the opposition as “terrorists.”

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Photo: Syrian President Bashar Assad, third from right, participates in Eid al-Adha prayers at a mosque in Damascus. Credit: EPA / SANA

Syrian government agrees to temporary cease-fire

BEIRUT — Responding to international peace efforts, Syria said Thursday its forces would observe a cease-fire from Friday to Monday, the period of the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha.

In an early evening bulletin, the official state news service and state-run television reported that the "general command" of the armed forces announced a “cease of military operations” for four days as of Friday. Despite the truce,  the  military reserves the right to respond to attacks or counter any efforts to reinforce or resupply rebels from neighboring nations, state TV said.  Further details were not immediately available.

The cease-fire could provide a glimmer of hope in a bloody, 19-month conflict that has  caused vast devastation and loss of life and threatens to destabilize much of the Middle East. But many observers regard the chances of a wider peace in Syria -- or even four days without some violence -- as slim.

Rebels fighting to oust President Bashar Assad have generally reacted warily to the cease-fire initiative. The government calls the rebels "terrorists" and "mercenaries" and says it will not negotiate with armed groups. Rebels say Assad must step down before any peace talks begin.