UPI, Damascus, 1 Nov 2012 – Syrian warplanes intensified bombings as Syrian rebels said they were now arming anti-regime Palestinians and Washington called for an opposition overhaul.
The regime’s escalated strategic-bombing airstrikes across northern Syria and the Damascus suburbs were unprecedented in the 20-month-old conflict, activists told The New York Times.
In one of the strikes, the Syrian military dropped old storage tanks packed with explosives from a helicopter on a line of people waiting for bread at a makeshift bakery in rebel-held town 12 miles west of Aleppo, killing at least 15 people, activists and witnesses said.
On the ground, army units raided rebel hideouts in and around Aleppo, Syria’s largest city, causing ‘heavy casualties’ among rebel fighters and destroying rebel weapons and other equipment, the official Syrian Arab News Agency reported, calling the rebels ‘terrorists.’
Just east of the capital Damascus, army warplanes attacked a collection of farms known as the Damascus Ghouta, where rebel Free Syrian Army fighters concentrate, the opposition Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
The Damascus Ghouta is a green agricultural belt surrounding Damascus in the south and east.
In other suburban Damascus violence, a bomb exploded near the shrine and burial place of Sayyida Zeinab, or Lady Zeinab, killing at least eight people and injuring more than two dozen, activists and state media reported. Zeinab bint Ali is a granddaughter of the Islamic Prophet Muhammad and is viewed by many Muslims as a great figure of sacrifice and strength.
SANA said rebels were responsible for the explosion.
The opposition Local Coordination Committees of Syria said 44 people were killed in Damascus and its suburbs Wednesday, including 18 in warplanes shelling. It said 53 were killed in and around Aleppo and counted 121 people killed across the country.
The opposition Syrian Network for Human Rights put the total number of dead at 141, including 48 around Damascus and 53 around Aleppo.
The death tolls could not be independently verified.
At the same time, Syrian rebels said they were now arming anti-regime Palestinians living in a Damascus enclave to fight pro-regime Palestinians in the same former refugee camp in a move observers said could fuel long-feared violence within Syria’s large Palestinian population.
‘As the civil war in Syria continues to unfold, I think the Palestinian fratricide will be a chapter,’ political science Professor Hilal Khashan of the American University of Beirut told the Financial Times.
‘The regime has been trying to enlist the Palestinians, and the rebels have been trying to do the same,’ he said.
The rebels told the Times the Palestinian group they set up and armed would fight a pro-regime militia brigade in Yarmouk Camp, a former refugee camp in Damascus now at the heart of a struggle for the capital’s southern suburbs.
The brigade is run by Ahmed Jibril, head of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, the Times said.
Jibri’s group — reputed to have carried out anti-U.S. and anti-Israeli attacks on behalf of Syria, Libya and Iran and to maintain cells in several European cities — controls security at Yarmouk Camp, home to some 150,000 Palestinians.
A bomb exploded under a Syrian army colonel’s car in Yarmouk Camp Wednesday, but he was not in the vehicle, the Syrian Observatory said.
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, called for an overhaul of Syria’s exile-led opposition political coalition, saying it has been largely ineffective, in part because it includes aging figures who have not been in Syria for decades.
She said Washington preferred to support those fighting President Bashar Assad’s forces on the front lines.
Clinton’s announcement in the Croatian capital Zagreb Wednesday marked a shift of U.S. policy and reflected growing U.S. frustration with the Paris-based Syrian National Council, initially charged by the West with galvanizing anti-Assad opposition, The New York Times and Wall Street Journal said.
Clinton said the new coalition should include anti-Assad fighters but exclude Islamist extremists who have joined the anti-Assad battle. She called Syria’s Islamist elements, including some linked to al-Qaida, part of an opportunistic attempt to hijack a legitimate rebellion.
Clinton’s said she would advance this idea at a conference in Doha, Qatar, next week for Syrian opposition groups and U.S., European Union and key Mideast representatives.