Fierce clashes raged across Syria despite a UN Security Council peace call, with 10 civilians on a bus trying to flee to Turkey among at least 26 people killed Thursday, monitors and activists said.
The bus, with women and children on board, was shot up near the town of Sermin in the northwestern province of Idlib, said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, without identifying the assailants. An opposition activist on the ground, Milad Fadl, contacted by AFP in Beirut, said the civilians were headed for Turkey to escape the bloodshed when regime forces opened fire.
The Britain-based Observatory said earlier that a 17-year-old boy was killed and dozens wounded in an army assault on Sermin itself. Army forces attacked several towns, while rebel fighters struck army posts in several provinces and announced a command structure to coordinate hit-and-run strikes in and around the capital. In the deadliest attack on the army, five soldiers were killed in a raid on a military checkpoint in the region of Latakia, said the Observatory.
The region has a large population of Alawites, members of the minority offshoot of Shiite Islam to which President Bashar al-Assad also belongs and which forms the backbone of his regime. In the south, rebel fighters killed a soldier and wounded four others near the village of Saida in Daraa province, where Syria’s year-old revolt against the regime erupted, said the monitoring group. Army deserters killed two soldiers in the town.
It added three civilians were killed as troops sprayed heavy machinegun fire in Qusayr, a town in the flashpoint province of Homs, central Syria, where rebel forces killed four soldiers. The reports could not be confirmed due to restrictions on the movements of foreign media. The escalation came just hours after the Security Council passed a statement urging Assad and his foes to implement “fully and immediately” international envoy Kofi Annan’s peace plan. Annan’s plan calls for Assad to pull troops and heavy weapons out of protest cities, a daily two-hour humanitarian pause to hostilities, access to all areas affected by the fighting, and a UN-supervised halt to all clashes. A correspondent at the scene also reported violent clashes in and around Sermin, a village near the town of Banash in Idlib, as army shelling and tank fire threw up thick plumes of black smoke.
Free Syrian Army fighters and regular troops were locked in close-up street fighting, rebel Sergeant Abu Adel told AFP by telephone from the scene of the clashes, as civilians took shelter in basements. At least four civilians, including two children, were killed and more than 30 wounded, according to FSA sources. “Tanks have been posted on the Sermin-Banach road blocking any evacuation of the wounded or villagers from fleeing the clashes,” said another rebel fighter, Abu Salem.
10 killed on bus fleeing Syria violence
Ten people, including women and children, were killed on Thursday as they were fleeing violence in Syria’s northwestern Idlib province on board a bus headed to Turkey, monitors said. Rami Abdel Rahman, head of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, said the bus driver and nine members of two separate families were killed when the vehicle came under fire. He said the killings took place near the town of Sermin, along a road that links Idlib province to Turkey further north. Milad Fadl, a local activist reached by AFP from Beirut, said regime forces had opened fire on the bus headed to a refugee camp in Turkey. Abdel Rahman said the victims included three children under the age of 15 and two women.
