Furious combat raged around strategic airports in northern Syria yesterday, the day after the UN gave a staggering toll of 60,000 dead in the country’s 21-month civil war.
Insurgents besieged troops on the perimeter of the international airport in Aleppo, the hard fought-over main city of Syria’s north, and a military airbase in Idlib Province, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
Aleppo’s critical civilian transportation hub has been closed since Tuesday after repeated attacks by rebels, according to an airport official, who said it would reopen as soon as the army regained control of the surrounding areas.
Photo: Reuters
Rebels holding much of the area surrounding Aleppo were targeted by government shelling overnight in the city’s Sakhur District and in the towns of Marea and Aazaz farther north near the Turkish border.
Meanwhile, hundreds of fighters with two hardcore Islamist rebel groups, al-Nusra Front and Ahrar al-Sham, fought soldiers around the Taftanaz airbase in Idlib, the British-based Observatory said, adding that air strikes were blasting rebel positions.
The rebels had remotely detonated a bomb at one of the airport’s gates the day before, but were pushed back by the army, according to both the Observatory and a military source inside the base.
The military source said that clashes outside the base had gone on non-stop for more than 48 hours, and there had been a large number of rebel casualties.
Three rebels were killed in combat with troops around the Deir Ezzor military airport, as fighting also broke out in the nearby provincial capital in the east of the country.
Near Damascus, warplanes carried out air strikes and ground troops launched rockets on the southwest towns of Daraya and Moadamiyet al-Sham in fresh attempts to wrest back control. In the town of Mleha, just east of Damascus, bodies were being recovered from a service station hit by a regime air strike on Wednesday.
The toll from that attack was not yet known, but the Observatory said at least 12 bodies were recovered, several of them rebels. The Local Coordination Committees, a grassroots network of activists, estimated that at least 50 people were killed.
The Observatory said 219 people died on Wednesday nationwide: 115 civilians, 57 rebels and 47 soldiers.
The overall death toll of the 21-month Syrian conflict has unsettled observers.
The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay on Wednesday called it “truly shocking,” as she revealed a vetted UN tally nearly a third higher than that previously compiled by the Observatory.
“The number of casualties is much higher than we expected, and is truly shocking,” she said in a statement.
“Given there has been no let-up in the conflict since the end of November, we can assume that more than 60,000 people have been killed by the beginning of 2013,” Pillay said.
The average number of deaths recorded in recent months was five times that registered in the middle of 2011, reflecting intensifying viciousness and the regime’s use of air strikes.
Pillay said in her statement that “this massive loss of life could have been avoided” if the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad had not chosen the “ruthless suppression” of what initially were peaceful protests.
Meanwhile, a freelance US reporter who contributed videos to Agence France-Presse (AFP) in recent months was kidnapped in Syria six weeks ago and has been missing since, his family revealed on Wednesday.
James Foley, 39, an experienced war reporter who has covered other conflicts, was seized by armed men in Idlib on Nov. 22, witnesses say.
No group has claimed responsibility for the abduction.
Foley’s family, which had earlier asked media groups not to report the abduction in the hope that a low profile would assist in efforts to free him, broke their silence on Wednesday to reveal his plight.
“We want Jim to come safely home, or at least we need to speak with him to know he’s okay,” said his father, John Foley.
NO LIVERPOOL TRIP: Taiwan’s Lin Yu-ting, who won a gold medal in the boxing at the Paris Olympics, was embroiled in controversy about her gender at that event Taiwanese boxer Lin Yu-ting (林郁婷) will not attend this year’s World Boxing Championships in Liverpool, England, due to a lack of response regarding her sex tests from the organizer, World Boxing. The national boxing association on Monday said that it had submitted all required tests to World Boxing, but had not received a response as of Monday, the departure day for the championships. It said the decision for Lin to skip the championships was made to protect its athletes, ensuring they would not travel to the UK without a guarantee of participation. Lin, who won a gold medal in the women’s 57kg boxing
RESPONSE: The transit sends a message that China’s alignment with other countries would not deter the West from defending freedom of navigation, an academic said Canadian frigate the Ville de Quebec and Australian guided-missile destroyer the Brisbane transited the Taiwan Strait yesterday morning, the first time the two nations have conducted a joint freedom of navigation operation. The Canadian and Australian militaries did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The Ministry of National Defense declined to confirm the passage, saying only that Taiwan’s armed forces had deployed surveillance and reconnaissance assets, along with warships and combat aircraft, to safeguard security across the Strait. The two vessels were observed transiting northward along the eastern side of the Taiwan Strait’s median line, with Japan being their most likely destination,
‘NOT ALONE’: A Taiwan Strait war would disrupt global trade routes, and could spark a worldwide crisis, so a powerful US presence is needed as a deterrence, a US senator said US Senator Deb Fischer on Thursday urged her colleagues in the US Congress to deepen Washington’s cooperation with Taiwan and other Indo-Pacific partners to contain the global security threat from China. Fischer and other lawmakers recently returned from an official trip to the Indo-Pacific region, where they toured US military bases in Hawaii and Guam, and visited leaders, including President William Lai (賴清德). The trip underscored the reality that the world is undergoing turmoil, and maintaining a free and open Indo-Pacific region is crucial to the security interests of the US and its partners, she said. Her visit to Taiwan demonstrated ways the
The US has revoked Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co’s (TSMC, 台積電) authorization to freely ship essential gear to its main Chinese chipmaking base, potentially curtailing its production capabilities at that older-generation facility. American officials recently informed TSMC of their decision to end the Taiwanese chipmaker’s so-called validated end user (VEU) status for its Nanjing site. The action mirrors steps the US took to revoke VEU designations for China facilities owned by Samsung Electronics Co and SK Hynix Inc. The waivers are set to expire in about four months. “TSMC has received notification from the US Government that our VEU authorization for TSMC Nanjing
RSS