Some of the worst violence in months racked Syria on Monday with residents of southern Damascus fleeing heavy shelling, several smaller towns shattered by air attacks and at least two car bombs erupting.
The Local Coordinating Committees, a collection of
activist organizations across Syria, said the daily toll reached at least 159,
including 72 killed in Idlib, and 47 in Damascus and its suburbs.
People in Damascus, the capital, said the fighting was
the fiercest they could remember since July, with thousands of people fled as
a Palestinian faction that supports the Assad government skirmished
with government opponents in three southern neighborhoods.
“It’s a real war,” said an activist reached in southern
Damascus via Skype, who used only one name, Eman, for her own safety.
“Explosions, bombing and gunfire, and of course the helicopters, which have
become part of the sky in Damascus now, like birds,” she said.
The fighting, escalating over three days, ignited the
quarters of Yarmouk and Tadamon, both heavily Palestinian, as well as Hajjar
al-Aswad, a long-embattled center of resistance to the government.
Syria took in large numbers of Palestinians who fled
their homes at the founding of Israel, and they and their descendants number
about 450,000 now. Many have sided with those leading the uprising, but the
Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, a faction with a
prominent role in the neighborhoods, still supports the government. Much of the
fighting involved Popular Front units, backed by government artillery.
Artillery rounds fired from the military airfield in Mezze slammed into the
area repeatedly, activists said.
Yarmouk, founded as a Palestinian refugee camp in 1957,
gradually became a residential district barely distinguishable from the rest of
greater Damascus. A Facebook page focused on camp news published a statement
from the Popular Front group saying it had thwarted an infiltration of the area
by government opponents.
“When the terrorists failed to enter, they fired mortars
killing a large number of martyrs and wounding a lot of people,” the statement
said.
Civilians have been fleeing in droves. Small artillery
hit a minibus carrying people trying to escape from Yarmouk, killing five of
them. Each side blamed the other for that strike.
Displaced families have started camping in back gardens
or schoolyards, Eman said.
A car bomb exploded in Mezze 86, a Damascus neighborhood
on the slopes below the official palace that houses the offices of
PresidentBashar al-Assad. The area is heavily populated by families linked to
the security forces, which Mr. Assad’s Alawite minority dominates. Pictures
posted on Facebook showed a large black column of smoke rising from the area.
The Free Syrian Army claimed responsibility for that
attack, saying in a statement that it targeted military officers and members of
the armed militias who fight for the government.
The bomb, a booby-trapped car, exploded in Bride Square,
killing at least 11 people and wounding more than 30, some of them critically,
said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which tracks the conflict from
abroad.
The official news agency, SANA, also put the death toll
at 11 killed but said at least 56 were injured. The explosion ignited other
cars and caused widespread destruction, it said.
Accounts differed more sharply on another car bombing,
outside a government-owned Rural Development Center near Hama. The rebels and
activists reported that dozens of soldiers were killed; the government said
just two civilians had died.
The Syrian Observatory, which tracks the conflict from
abroad, said that Jabhet Al-Nusra — known as a jihadist organization — and
other rebel groups in the region collaborated to explode a car bomb at a
government checkpoint in a village near Hama, killing at least 50 soldiers. If
true, that would make it one of the single deadliest attacks against the
government since the uprising started in March 2011.
The accounts from the observatory and rebel groups stated
that the military had taken over the development center to house military
units. Checkpoints in rural areas often serve as rudimentary bases for the
government, with large numbers of men and equipment.
“They targeted one of the biggest checkpoints in the
region,” said Ahmad Raadoun, a member of the Free Syrian Army in the Hama
suburbs who was reached by Skype. “It’s a big building where the regime forces
were headquartered.”
Mr. Raadoun said he was about 20 miles from the site,
which he said was in the village of Ziyara. He said the bomb caused extensive
casualties and other damage.
The official account from SANA said a suicide bomber in a
vehicle killed two civilians and wounded 10 others. The government routinely
refers to rebels as terrorists and has repeatedly singled out the Jabhet group
as a terrorist organization.
In its daily roundup of violence around the country, SANA
also said that government forces clashed with “terrorists” in the eastern city
of Deir al-Zour, and in Aleppo, in the north.
Activist organizations reported a number of airstrikes
around the country, with the toll particularly high in the northern towns of
Harem and Kafr Nabl, both near Idlib.
Kafr Nabl has gained a reputation throughout the conflict
for its savvy demonstrations. For instance, villagers often carry signs in
English to attract international support.
But the mood was starkly different on Monday, with local
activists saying that a government airstrike had killed at least 17 people and
that more were buried under the rubble.
Video accounts cannot be independently confirmed, but
three videos posted on Monday from Kafr Nabl all had similar scenes and the
same people seen mourning over corpses covered with bloody blankets and
tarpaulins on the main street.
“They’re gone! They’re gone!” shouted one middle-age man
with white hair, seemingly distraught over the death of his two sons. “Where is
Waleed? Where is he? I just want my kids, my two kids they are waiting for
their mother to come.”
One extremely graphic video posted from the
village of Kafr Nabl, near Idlib, shows bloodied victims dumped into a truck in
the aftermath of what was described as an aerial assault. A shot of the main
street shows flames leaping from vehicles and residents running around in
panic. At least five men and one woman died, the Syrian Observatory said, but
more victims were believed buried under the rubble.
At the United Nations on Monday, a top relief official
said the organization’s aid effort in Syria “is very dangerous and very
difficult.” The official, John Ging, director of operations of the Office for
the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, told reporters at a news conference
that the United Nations was supplying 1.5 million people in Syria with food and
that nearly half was being delivered into areas of conflict, but “there are
areas beyond our reach, particularly areas under opposition control for quite a
long time.”
In Rome, the World Food Program, the world’s largest
anti-hunger aid agency, announced that its executive director, Ertharin Cousin,
would be visiting Lebanon and Jordan on a three-day trip starting Tuesday to
assess the needs of the growing Syrian refugee populations in those countries.
She will inspect food distribution points in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley and in
Jordan’s Zaatri camp near the Syrian border.
*Hania Mourtada contributed reporting from Beirut; Hala Droubi
from Dubai, United Arab Emirates; and Rick Gladstone from New York.