Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s forces killed at least four civilians in an intensified tank and rocket bombardment on opposition districts in the Syrian city of Homs yesterday to put down a popular revolt demanding his removal, activists said.
“This is the most violent barrage since the attack on Homs started six days ago. The four included a 55-year old woman. They were killed by shelling that hit a building where they live in Bab Amro,” opposition activist Mohammad Hassan said by satelite phone from Homs.
The account could not be independently confirmed. Syria restricts access by most foreign journalists.
Footage on YouTube showed a doctor at a field hospital in Bab Amro next to the body of the woman, who appeared to have been hit in the head.
“This is Ibtissam al-Dalati, mother of three. Shrapnel hit her in the head,” the doctor says, holding the woman’s fractured and bloody head. “I call upon all Syrians to take to the streets to take the pressure off Homs.”
On Friday, twin car bombs targeting security posts in Syria’s second city of Aleppo killed at least 28 people, state media said, with the rebels accusing the regime of launching the attacks as a diversion.
The explosions came as tank-backed troops advanced on pockets of resistance in the besieged protest hub of Homs, as heavy security deployments nationwide thwarted planned protests against regime ally Russia.
The powerful mid-morning blasts in the northern commercial hub also wounded 235 people, said state TV, which broadcast gruesome footage.
Mangled bodies were shown in pools of blood outside rows of shattered buildings and piles of rubble strewn across an avenue.
State TV called the bombings, the first in Aleppo since the uprising against al-Assad’s regime erupted almost a year ago, the work of “armed terrorist gangs.”
The rebel Free Syrian Army blamed the government itself for the attacks.
“This criminal regime is carrying out bomb attacks in Aleppo to steer attention away from what it is doing in Homs, Zabadani and elsewhere,” its spokesman, Colonel Maher Nouaimi, said in a telephone interview.
Meanwhile, satellite image provider DigitalGlobe Inc released photos on Friday that appear to show Syrian army tanks and armored vehicles in Homs.
DigitalGlobe said the images were taken late Friday morning by the company’s WorldView 2 satellite from about 772km above the Earth. The satellite images show an increase in the level of army activity in and around Homs from the previous 24 hours.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema
RSS