Israeli attack exposes Assad's air defense weakness: rebels

By Khaled Yacoub Oweis

AMMAN (Reuters) - It was too late when air raid sirens wailed at one of Syria's most fortified military compounds. Israeli jets were already attacking the Hameh complex and civilian employees in nearby housing were scrambling for cover with their families.

Around Damascus the warplanes staged a series of raids in the early hours of Sunday including on President Bashar al-Assad's air defenses, opposition and rebel sources said. But none had more devastating results than at Hameh, a high-walled site linked to his chemical and biological weapons program.

"Families ran to basements and stayed there," said one witness of the attack on Hameh that lit up the night sky and shook the ground kilometers (miles) away. "We heard ambulances. There were very few workers at the compound at that time but an attack of this scale must have killed a lot of soldiers among the guards and patrols."

The raids have raised fears that Israel could be drawn into Syria's civil war, in which the United Nations says 70,000 people have died since an uprising against Assad family rule began two years ago. Damascus has accused Israel of effectively helping what it calls al Qaeda Islamist terrorists.

Western intelligence sources said the attacks were designed to prevent Syria sending Iranian-supplied missiles to the Shi'ite Hezbollah group in neighboring Lebanon for possible use against Israel. An Israeli general played down the consequences on Monday, saying: "There are no winds of war".

The witness said windows were blown out in workers' flats several hundred meters (yards) from Hameh's perimeter, even though the centre of the blasts was further away on the huge site, which is surrounded by air defenses.

Opposition sources said the warplanes also hit facilities manned by Assad's Republican Guards on Mount Qasioun, which overlooks central Damascus, and the nearby Barada River basin.

The area is believed to be a supply route to Hezbollah, according to residents, activists and opposition military sources. Their statements could not be verified due to restrictions on media operating in Syria.

RIGHT ON TARGET

One rebel commander said Assad's forces have been fortifying their positions on Qasioun since the uprising began in March 2011. "The Israelis still managed to get to the weapons stores. The secondary explosions indicate that they were right on target," he said, adding that Syrian air defenses, already weakened by the civil war "could not do anything".

Other opposition sources also said the targets included air defenses comprising Russian-made surface to air missiles and heavy anti-aircraft guns, deployed on Qasioun and overlooking the rebellious Damascus district of Barzeh.

"The destruction appeared to be massive. We have heard that the army has asked rank and file personnel based in Qasioun and those on leave to stay away. The military usually does this sort of thing when there is a big mess to sort out," said one activist in Damascus, who did not want to be named.

Assad's forces have fired on rebels from Qasioun, which is largely a closed military zone apart from a strip of restaurants, flattening areas of Damascus below.

However, it was unclear whether Israel was effectively helping the rebels by raiding the Qasioun sites, as Damascus has said, or attacked the air defenses purely to safeguard its own operations against Iranian-supplied missiles.

The Syrian government has said that Israel raided three military sites. Several media published what they described as a photo supplied by the official Syrian news agency showing a huge pile of collapsed concrete at a flattened building in an unspecified site they said was targeted by the Israelis. Reuters could not verify the photo.

Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan, a strong opponent of Assad, said on Tuesday the Israeli air strikes had given the Syrian government an opportunity to cover up its own killings.

"The air strike Israel carried out on Damascus is completely unacceptable. There is no rationale, no pretext that can excuse this operation," Erdogan told parliament in Ankara.

Opposition sources familiar with the Hameh site said a large section of the compound housing missile systems appeared to have been hit. Mobile missile launchers, part of a Russian-supplied SA-17 air defense system deployed elsewhere on Qasioun, also appear to have been destroyed, they said

Western intelligence agencies suspect work on chemical weapons has been conducted at Hameh. Assad's government and the rebels have accused each other of carrying out three chemical weapons attacks, one near Aleppo and another near Damascus in March, and another near Homs in December.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an opposition monitoring group based in Britain, said at least 42 Syrian soldiers were killed and 100 others are missing.

Other opposition sources put the death toll at 300 soldiers, mostly belonging to the Republican Guards, an elite unit that forms the last line of defense for Damascus and comprises mainly members of Assad's Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shi'ite Islam that has controlled Syria since the 1960s.

Although casualties among Assad's troops appeared to be high, opposition sources said the raids were mainly targeted on storage facilities. "Whatever they hit, there is little chance that anything was left intact," another source in Damascus said.

(editing by David Stamp)

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Dozens dead as Assad's forces storm coastal village

By Erika Solomon

BEIRUT (Reuters) - Forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad retook a central district in the city of Homs on Thursday, driving a wedge between two isolated pockets of rebel resistance in Syria's third largest city, fighters and activists said.

The recapture of Wadi al-Sayeh, which links the besieged rebel stronghold in Khalidiyah to the opposition-held old city, appears to be part of a series of carefully focused counter-offensives that mark a shift from the indiscriminate campaigns earlier in the two-year-old conflict.

Homs is a link in the corridor connecting Assad's Damascus powerbase with the traditional Mediterranean heartland of his minority Alawite community. It was an early center of the mainly Sunni Muslim uprising against four decades of Assad family rule.

Following recent gains in rural areas around Homs, Assad's forces surrounded the towns of Baida and Maqreb on the road to the coastal city of Banias on Thursday, activists said, the latest stage in a campaign to secure the corridor.

They also seized Qaysa town on the eastern edge of Damascus, part of a steady move north from airport on the city's south-eastern edge which would create a line of control locking down the eastern approaches to the city and close off weapons supplies from the Jordanian border.

A call issued by several activists in the area warned the disparate rebel forces to pull together or face defeat.

"If you do not unite under one flag the regime is going to hunt you down, one brigade after another," it said.

Assad has lost control of much of northern and eastern Syria in the fighting, which the United Nations says has killed 70,000 people, and is battling rebels in most cities. But he says his forces still hold the upper hand.

On Monday, his prime minister escaped assassination when a bomb struck his convoy, killing six people. The president appeared two days later, touring an electricity power station and saying he would not be forced into hiding.

"This is a challenge to us to cower in fear or remain fearless. We will not be afraid," Assad said.

HOMS OFFENSIVE

In Homs, a rebel fighter told Reuters by Skype that pro-Assad forces from the paramilitary National Defense Army were making gains.

"They managed to take large parts of Wadi al-Sayeh - the besieged area is being divided as we speak," he said.

Before moving in, the fighters had blown up buildings.

The British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the operation to recapture Wadi al-Sayeh was coordinated by forces from Iran and Lebanon's Hezbollah militant group, both allies of Assad.

The Homs rebel said men captured by rebels reported being trained in Iran and the rebels also heard Lebanese accents among some fighters speaking on intercepted radio messages.

Iran and Hezbollah have denied sending forces to fight alongside Assad's troops but Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah has been increasingly open about the group's presence in Syria, where he says it is defending Lebanese and Shi'ite communities from attack by Sunni Muslim rebels.

In coastal Banias province, activists and residents said Assad's forces were surrounding the towns of Baida and Maqreb and firing mortar rounds at them.

Locals on both sides said clashes were still going on. The Observatory said at least six soldiers and militiamen were killed and at least 20 wounded.

"There are also witness reports of executions against residents, some of them by gunfire and others by knives at the hands of regime forces and loyalist gunmen (the shabbiha)," said Rami Abdelrahman, head of the Observatory.

Rockets were also falling on the outskirts of Banias city itself and smoke could be seen rising from the area, he said.

(Editing by Angus MacSwan)

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Syrian rebels pierce Assad's siege lines in Homs: opposition

AMMAN (Reuters) - Syrian rebels launched a counter-offensive against a government siege of their positions in the strategic city of Homs despite coming under ferocious aerial bombardment on Sunday, opposition campaigners said.

The mixed city, inhabited by Sunnis and Alawites, an offshoot of Shi'ite Islam who have dominated Syria since the 1960s, has emerged as a major battleground in the two-year-old uprising against President Bashar al-Assad, which has claimed about 70,000 lives so far, according to the United Nations.

Homs, 140 kms (88 miles) north of Damascus in central Syria, lies on a vital road juncture linking army bases on the coast, home to a large proportion of Assad's minority Alawite sect, and government forces in the capital Damascus.

Sunni Muslim rebels broke through government lines in the north and west to ease a months-long army siege on their strongholds in the center of the city, opposition sources said.

Fighters based in the provinces of Hama and Idlib advanced on Homs this weekend from the north while brigades from rural Homs attacked government positions in Baba Amro. This area was overrun by the army after a long siege a year ago and subsequently visited by Assad.

The official state news agency said "a unit of our brave army engaged with an armed terrorist group that had tried to infiltrate Baba Amro ... and killed and wounded several of its members."

Abu Imad, an opposition activist, said the sound of aerial bombardment on Baba Amro in western Homs shook the city.

"This situation is muddled in the whole of Homs, but what is certain is that the regime is busy trying to repel rebel brigades who have broken into Baba Amro from its rural surroundings," he said.

Both sides have taken heavy casualties since the army went on the offensive 10 days ago to take the central districts of Khalidya, al-Qusour and Old Homs, where rebel brigades have been dug in for months, according to opposition military sources.

Rebels repelled several army attempts to take Khalidya with infantry in the last 10 days and dozens from both sides have been killed, the sources said.

ASSAD SAYS FOCUS IS BIG CITIES

Assad, fighting to maintain his family's four-decade-old grip on the country, appears to be focusing his military campaign on holding the main cities, along a highway axis running north of Homs to Hama and Aleppo and south to Damascus and Deraa, according to opposition sources.

In a meeting with parliamentarians from Turkey's main opposition Republican People's Party in Damascus on Thursday, Assad said he couldn't control some parts of Syria, accusing Turkey of backing what he described as terrorists.

"We can't control all parts of Syria. We are focused on big cities. There are terrorist attacks in the countryside," Assad said according to a report the party published on Sunday.

Nader al-Husseini, an activist from Baba Amro, said several roadblocks in the district had fallen to rebel fighters and dozens of loyalist troops and militia had fled to the nearby districts of Jobar and Inshaat.

"For the regime to take hits in Baba Amro is damaging to its morale, especially since Assad visited Baba Amro and was filmed there, supposedly sealing the regime's triumph," Husseini said.

In the east of Syria, a desert region that extends to Iraq's Sunni heartland, government jets bombarded the city of Raqqa, which fell to the opposition last week, killing five people. But some refugees who had fled to nearby rural and desert regions have begun returning to the city, activists said.

Large parts of eastern Syria, which accounts for all of the country's oil production and most of its grain output, have been captured by the armed opposition in recent weeks.

But the Syrian National Coalition, an umbrella group of the political opposition, postponed a meeting to form a provisional government, in the latest setback to opposition efforts to create an administration to take over if Assad is ousted.

The coalition meeting to elect a provisional prime minister, which was due to be held on March 12 after being postponed once already, has been rescheduled for March 20, but it was uncertain it would be held even then, coalition sources said.

Meanwhile, the number of refugees fleeing Syria could triple by the end of the year from one million now, according to a new U.N. estimate.

"Everything depends on whether or not we will have a political solution but we need to be prepared for a very strong increase of the present numbers," U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres told reporters in Ankara.

Opposition campaigners said at least 20 bodies of young men captured and shot by security forces were found on Sunday in a small waterway running through the contested city of Aleppo.

It was the largest number of bodies lifted in a single day from what became known as "the river of martyrs", after 65 bodies turned up in late January. An average of several bodies a day have been appearing in the river since, several activists in the northern city, which is near Turkey, told Reuters.

Syrian authorities have banned most independent media from the country, making verification of reported events difficult.

(Reporting by Khaled Yacoub Oweis, Amman newsroom; Editing by Jason Webb)

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