 | Syrian Rebels Reported to Take Key City After Heavy Fighting
New York Times-34 minutes ago
BEIRUT, Lebanon — Syrian rebel fighters seized much of the contested north-central city of Raqqa on Monday after days of heavy clashes with ...
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Aid package for Syrian rebels helps neither them nor US
Opinion
Syrian Rebels Reported to Take Key City After Heavy Fighting
Khalil Ashawi/Reuters
Damaged areas in Deir al-Zour, an eastern city, on Sunday.
By HANIA MOURTADA, ALAN COWELL and RICK GLADSTONE
Published: March 4, 2013
BEIRUT, Lebanon — Syrian rebel fighters seized much of the contested
north-central city of Raqqa on Monday after days of heavy clashes with
government forces, smashing a statue of President Bashar al-Assad’s
father in the central square and occupying the governor’s palace,
according to activist groups and videos uploaded to the Internet.
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If the insurgents manage to gain and retain control of Raqqa, capital of
Raqqa Province, it would signify a potentially important turn in the
two-year-old Syrian conflict. Raqqa, a strategic city on the Euphrates
River, would be the first provincial capital completely taken over by
the armed resistance to President Assad. For the government, the loss of
Raqqa would diminish the prospects that Mr. Assad’s military, now
fighting on a number of fronts, could retake a vast swathe of northern
and eastern Syria from the rebels.
The Raqqa news coincided with reports from Iraq that at least 40 Syrian
soldiers who had taken temporary refuge from rebels on the Iraqi side of
the border on Sunday were killed on Monday as the Iraqi military was
transporting them back into Syria on a bus. Iraqi officials said the bus
was damaged by bombs and that unidentified gunmen killed most of the
occupants. If confirmed, it would be the most deadly case of
cross-border violence between Iraq and Syria since the Syrian conflict
began.
Rebel videos posted on YouTube about the Raqqa takeover included the destruction of a statue
of Hafez al-Assad, the former president and father of Bashar, whose
family’s four-decade-old control of the country is now threatened by the
insurgency. Footage showed anti-Assad activists pulling the statue
down, its head smashing in the fall.
The Local Coordination Committees, a network of anti-Assad activists in
Syria, said the governor’s palace in Raqqa had been seized by
insurgents. An activist reached by phone in Raqqa, Abu Muhammad, said he
also believed that the palace had been “completely liberated.” The
whereabouts of its loyalist occupants was not clear.
“The only place still under control of the regime, in the entire
province of Raqqa, is the military security building,” the activist
said. “Clashes are raging there right now between the heroes of the free
army and regime forces.”
Raqqa had been under insurgent siege for days, but a breakthrough came
Saturday when government forces abandoned the city’s central prison. The
Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based anti-Assad group
with a network of observers inside Syria, said fighters from Al Nusra
Front and other insurgent units seized the prison and released hundreds
of inmates.
Earlier Monday, anti-Assad activists reported heavy fighting was raging
between rebels and government forces backed by tanks and warplanes in
Homs, the central Syrian city that had been relatively quiet recently.
Details of the clashes were imprecise, but the Syrian Observatory said
fighting flared in several neighborhoods of Homs after government forces
had launched an offensive to dislodge rebels on Sunday.
An activist in Homs, contacted via Skype, who identified himself as Abu
Bilal, said there had been a successions of “explosions that shook the
entire city” on Monday and clouds of black smoke blanketed some
neighborhoods. The Local Coordination Committees said there had been
“fierce and continuous shelling from heavy artillery and rocket
launchers” directed at insurgents in several areas.
The clashes seemed to shift attention from Aleppo, where fighting had
swirled for days around the Khan al-Asal police academy in Aleppo,
Syria’s most populous city and once regarded its economic heart, after
months of attempts by the insurgents to storm it.
Both sides in the civil war, which started as a peaceful uprising almost
two years ago and has now claimed an estimated 70,000 lives,
acknowledged relatively high death tolls in the fighting for Khan
al-Asal.
The pro-government Al-Watan newspaper in Syria on Monday accused
opposition fighters of massacring 115 police officers and wounding 50
there.
On Sunday, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said 200 government
soldiers and rebels died in the fighting. With other fatalities
elsewhere, the Observatory said, the tally for the day stood at 260,
among them 115 government troops, 104 rebels and 45 civilians.
The fighting coincided with new efforts by outsiders, including the
United States, Britain and their allies, to support the rebels with
nonlethal aid. The British foreign secretary, William Hague, has hinted,
however, that Britain might consider arming the insurgents — a stance
that prompted Mr. Assad to say in an interview published on Sunday that
Britain was seeking to “militarize” the conflict.
In an interview
published in The Sunday Times of London, Mr. Assad also restated his
terms for peace talks that seemed likely to preclude any negotiations
with rebels who are pressing the Obama administration to go beyond the
$60 million in nonlethal aid promised by Secretary of State John Kerry
last week.
“How can we ask Britain to play a role while it is determined to
militarize the problem?” Mr. Assad said. “How can we expect them to make
the violence less while they want to send military supplies to the
terrorists?” The Syrian authorities call their armed adversaries
terrorists.
Mr. Hague responded by saying: “I think this will go down as one of the
most delusional interviews that any national leader has given in modern
times.”
Britain plans to announce a new package of aid for the rebels this week,
but Mr. Hague has declined to specify what it contains.
In the interview with The Sunday Times of London, Mr. Assad said he was
“ready to negotiate with anyone, including militants, who surrender
their arms.”
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