SYRIA – News
CONFLICT ENTERS NEW PHASE AS HEAVY FIGHTING ESCALATES BY BOTH SIDES RIGHT ACROSS THE COUNTRY:CHANGE IN ATTITUDE PERCEIVED AS HAGUE COMPARES SYRIA NOW TO BOSNIA IN THE 90s AND SAYS “WE CAN’T RULE ANYTHING OUT”:
OPPOSITION COUP AS ROCKET DEFENCE BATTALION NEAR HOMS GIVES UP AND “GOES HOME”:
TIMELINE – 11th JUNE 2012 10.14 GMT:
As the main Opposition group, the Syrian National Council (SNC), elected a new leader, Assad’s forces appear to have abandoned any attempt at implementing a ceasefire and to have declared all out war on any centres of resistance.
Sign in Homs That Says It All
Over the weekend Assad’s Army pounded the Homs area with shells and rockets, killing at least 35 people in Homs, Qusair, Talbiseh and Rastan, all significant Free Syrian Army (FSA) strongholds.
According to the UN Assad’s soldiers and armed militias have killed at least 10,000 people, though unofficial sources put the total as high as 16,000. The Syrian Government puts its own military losses at 2,600 dead.
According to an activist, Abu Qassem, at least 500 rockets and shells have fallen on Rastan since Saturday and helicoptors were firing machine guns into the area. “The Free Syrian Army is far outgunned, but it is responding by mounting guerrilla attacks while trying to avoid direct exchange of fire,” he said.
Rastan is well known as a former recruitment centre for the Syrian Army, but many of its Sunni officers have since defected.
In Talbiseh there was heavy shelling after some soldiers at road blocks defected and drove 2 armoured personnel carriers into the town.
In Homs city itself, Army attacks were concenrated on the Sunni suburb of Al Khalidiya. There was also Army bombardment in Damacus on the northern suburb of Qaboun followed by raids and house-to-house searches by soldiers and the Shabiha armed militia.
Opposition resistance has been strengthened by a huge increase in defections since the massacres in the last 2 weeks.
FSA Fight Back With Rifles & Homemade Bombs
Since Tuesday there has been heavy fighting in the mountanous region of Haffa not far from the coastal city of Latakia.
The mountains provide refuge for 100s of Opposition fighters and despite attacks by helicopter gunships, reports say that they have killed 58 Syrian Army soldiers and wounded more than 200.
The Assad regime has also continued its assault on Daraa in the south and its surrounding villages over the weekend. This video shows unverified and unlocated footage of Syrian Army troops shelling a town and/or city, HERE:
CHANGE IN ATTITUDE PERCEIVED AS HAGUE COMPARES SYRIA NOW TO BOSNIA IN THE 90s AND SAYS “WE CAN’T RULE ANYTHING OUT”:
On Sunday the SNC elected Abdulbaset Sieda from the Kurdish community as their leader for a 3 month term. In his first address as leader, Sieda called for mass defections across Syria both within the armed forces and the civil service.
Sieda though, like his predecessor Burhan Ghalioun, is a long time Syrian exile, having spent a good part of his life in Sweden. It therefore remains to be seen whether the SNC, with its tenuous links to the FSA and the Opposition underground within Syria, can be effective.
Willian Hague, the British Foreign Secretary, said on Sunday that time was “clearly running short” and compared the situation to Bosnia in the 1990s when the international community was finally forced to intervene in order to save lives. With Syria “on the edge of collapse or of a sectarian civil war … I don’t think we can rule anything out,” he added.
