The battle for the Syrian city of Aleppo intensified on Wednesday as United Nations observers there reported that Syrian jets had fired rockets into contested neighborhoods and that rebels had commandeered tanks and other heavy weapons.
Opposition leaders — a few hours after
President Bashar al-Assad urged his forces to step up the fight —
also said that they had found dozens of bodies in a suburb of Damascus in the
aftermath of the Syrian army’s house-to-house search for rebel fighters and
activists. This claim of a new massacre came as the rebels faced severe
criticism themselves for what appeared to be their brutal summary execution,
one day earlier, of suspected pro-government gunmen on the streets of Aleppo,
recorded and uploaded on the Internet.
Videos purported to have been taken in the Damascus
suburb, Jdeidit Artouz, showed bodies lined up under bloodstained sheets, as a
narrator gave an estimated count that continued rising: 37, 42, and then even
more.
“I counted 52 bodies,” said Abu Abdullah, a
resident who said he had helped move the dead to a local mosque before burial.
“I’m really shocked. Why here?”
The bodies were found near an area where rebels
said fighting had flared in the past week. But analysts said the bodies
appearing outside Damascus in a town also filled with refugees — along with
reports of renewed fighting in the capital and an escalation of combat in
Aleppo, Syria’s largest metropolis and commercial epicenter — all
suggested that the 17-month-old conflict was becoming increasingly intense and
bitter, with more front lines and more bloodshed.
“It’s a rapid escalation,” said Andrew J. Tabler, a
senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “Once you start
using fixed wing aircraft and you have a city under full revolt, it’s clear
that the Assad regime is not going to stop and is not breaking. We’re entering
a new phase of this conflict.”
Aleppo, which for much of the anti-Assad uprising
had been relatively stable, now is the site of the most vicious fighting. For
nearly two weeks, the Syrian army has been battling rebel troops for control of
the city, and for the first time, the United Nations said on Wednesday what
rebels had been saying for days: the Syrian army was using jet fighters in its
arsenal of heavy weapons aimed at crushing the opposition. And they are not
just flying, as in the past; now, according to the United Nations monitor
mission in Syria and videos showing flashes of light bursting from dark jets,
they are firing.
“Our observers confirmed fighter aircrafts firing
rockets and cannons — heavy machine gun fire,” said Sausan Ghosheh, a
spokeswoman for the United Nations monitor mission.
Mr. Tabler noted that the Syrian warplanes are not
yet dropping bombs. But the calculated escalation to the use of jets seemed to
be part of a concerted effort by President Assad to rally his supporters by
making clear that he would not limit his military effort. In rare published
remarks seemingly designed to marshal government forces and dissuade anyone
thinking of defecting, he called on Syria’s military to show “more readiness
and continued preparations” to confront “internal agents” seeking to
destabilize his battered country, according to the official SANA news agency.
To commemorate the 67th anniversary of the founding
of the Syrian Army, he also used his remarks to blame opponents for seeking to
keep Syria from “improving our society to the level of developed countries.”
And he said Syria’s “battle with the enemy takes multiple forms.”
This week it has become increasingly clear to
outside military analysts that the fighting is likely to drag on in Aleppo.
Helicopters thwacked overhead Wednesday as clashes broke out around several
more police stations, which have become a focal point for rebels seeking to
hold neighborhoods or gain ground in new areas.
Taxi drivers skittered down streets charging four
or five times the usual fare, while residents said water, food and electricity
seemed ever scarcer.
Alarmed by the worsening deprivation, the United
Nations World Food Program on Wednesday sent food assistance for 28,000 people
in Aleppo, with plans to deliver the aid through partners like the Syrian Red
Crescent. In July, United Nations officials said they provided food assistance
to 541,575 people in Syria, falling far short of its goal of 850,000 people,
because of fighting in several parts of the country.
With the rebels now possessing tanks – United
Nations observers did not have information on how many, or where they might be
deployed – the conflict seems to be moving ever further away from the six-point
plan for peace outlined by Kofi Annan, the special Syria envoy, whose plan
seems increasingly irrelevant. Instead of steps toward a cease-fire, both sides
appear to be rushing into the breach of civil war.
Rebels and activists reported skirmishes in several
parts of the country on Wednesday, including heavily Christian areas of
Damascus that had been quiet, and the battle for public opinion also expanded.
Opposition figures drew special attention to the
bodies in JdeiditArtouz – sending an alert to reporters with a link to
live-streaming video of a mass funeral procession and mass burial – just one
day after rebels in Aleppo caused an outcry among rights groups and others over
their videotaped public executions of men identified as pro-government
militiamen.
Those executions attracted hundreds of thousands of
views on You Tube, and were cited by Russia, the Syrian government’s most
important foreign backer, as new evidence of brutality by Mr. Assad’s armed
adversaries, whom he routinely calls terrorists.
“Bloody reprisal of the opposition forces over the
government supporters in Aleppo proves that human rights are violated by both
sides,” said Gennady Gatilov, the deputy Russian foreign minister, in
a Twitter message.
Human Rights Watch described the killings as a “war
crime,” and as it began to take on greater significance as a symbol of rebel
street justice, the rebels and activists tried pivoting on Wednesday afternoon
to an example of what they described as a regime “massacre.”
Susan Ahmad, a spokeswoman for the revolutionary
council of Damascus, an anti-Assad group, argued in an interview that many of
the victims in Jdeidit Arouz were civilians, and that the town had been a
refuge for families fleeing fighting in Damascus. “Almost all of the dead were
extrajudicially executed,” she said.
**Reporting was contributed by Hwaida Saad and
Dalal Mawad in Beirut, Alan Cowell in London, an employee of The New York Times
in Aleppo, Syria, and Rick Gladstone in New York.