ALEPPO: Syrian rebels have begun a major operation in the Aleppo region, aiming to strike at security compounds and bases around Syria’s largest city, activists said yesterday.
It would be evidence that weeks of intense bombardments by the Syrian military, including airstrikes, have failed to dislodge the rebels. Instead, fighting rages across the country in a 17-month civil war that shows no sign of ending soon.
The rebel offensives in Aleppo are led by a brigade made up mostly of army defectors who specialize in operating artillery and tanks, said Mohammed Saeed, an activist based in the city.
He said the first attacks began shortly before midnight Thursday and lasted until yesterday, when the “Brigade of Free Syrians” launched coordinated strikes on several security compounds in Aleppo.
“The new operations aim to strike at regime forces’ centers and air bases throughout Aleppo (province),” Saeed said via Skype.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said one of yesterday’s targets was a compound in the Aleppo neighborhood of Zahraa, killing and wounding a number of troops. It gave no figures.
Saeed said rebels attacked four security buildings around Aleppo, using tanks, rocket launchers and machine guns.
The state-run news agency, SANA, said troops killed and wounded several gunmen in the clashes.
Rebels took parts of Aleppo, Syria’s commercial capital, last month. Since then, government forces have been trying to recapture them. Rebels also control much of the wider Aleppo province, including areas on the border with Turkey.
In Geneva, the UN refugee agency reported a growing number of Syrians fleeing to Lebanon’s eastern Bekaa Valley, near the Syrian border.
Agency spokesman Adrian Edwards said local authorities report about 2,200 people arrived there over the past week, almost double the weekly average. He told reporters yesterday in Geneva that another 400 Syrians are reaching northern Lebanon each week.
Edwards said Turkey has opened two more refugee camps for Syrians in the past week and is now hosting 80,410 people in 11 camps and schools in its border provinces.
Meanwhile, Turkey’s nonstarter call for a humanitarian safe zone inside Syria offers the clearest sign yet that diplomacy to end the bloodshed in the most violent uprising of the Arab Spring is at a dead end.
Any new push by the international community to stop the killing is likely to remain on hold until the new UN chief envoy to Syria, Lakhdar Brahimi, gets his feet on the ground and — more importantly — until the Nov. 6 US presidential election.
Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and other prominent Republicans have called for arming Syrian rebels, a step critics fear would only escalate the violence without necessarily bringing a quick end to a more than 17-month conflict that activists say has killed more than 20,000 people.
A frustrated Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu told the council that he’d come to New York in hopes the members would take “long overdue steps” to alleviate the suffering and establish camps inside Syria for those forced to flee their homes.
“Apparently, I was wrong about my expectations,” Davutoglu said.
Establishing a safe zone in Syria amounts to entering the territory of a sovereign country to offer protection to civilians, many who are sympathetic to the rebels.
Without a guarantee from Assad that he would not attack the zone, foreign governments would have to assume responsibility for protecting civilians there — through troops on the ground and through preventing Syrian attack aircraft from flying over the territory.
Meanwhile, the West is running out of options besides trying to do more to care for the tens of thousands of refugees.
With Syrian diplomacy all but dead, the Obama administration is focusing on political transition and helping the rebels defeat the Syrian regime. Washington has increased its humanitarian aid to $74 million and its “nonlethal” communications assistance to $25 million.