Syria rebels claim downing of helicopter in Damascus

Syrian rebels claimed they shot down an army helicopter during fierce fighting in Damascus on Monday, saying it was to avenge the “massacre” of over 330 people blamed on regime forces in the town of Daraya.
State television said the aircraft crashed near a mosque in the eastern district of Qaboon, where activists reported heavy shelling by combat helicopters and fierce fighting between government troops and Free Syrian Army rebels.
“It was in revenge for the Daraya massacre,” Omar al-Qabooni, spokesman for the FSA’s Badr battalion in Damascus told AFP, adding that rebels had found the body of the pilot after the helicopter crashed to the ground in a ball of flames. A series of explosions rocked the city from about dawn, an AFP correspondent said, while the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported battles in Qaboon and the neighbouring district of Jubar, where anti-regime sentiment is strong.
The FSA also said it shot down a Syrian warplane on August 13 in the eastern province of Deir Ezzor, but the claims cannot be independently confirmed.
The assault on the northeast of the capital was unleashed a day after opposition activists accused President Bashar al-Assad’s regime of a gruesome new massacre in the Daraya, a twon southwest of the capital. The Observatory said hundreds of bodies had been found in the small Sunni Muslim town after what activists described as brutal five-day onslaught of shelling, summary executions and house-to-house raids by government troops.
It said Monday that a total of 334 bodies had now been found in Daraya, of which 241 had been identified.
Government troops launched the offensive last Tuesday in a bid to crush insurgents who have regrouped in the southwestern outskirts of Damascus after the regime claimed to have retaken most of the capital late last month.
Assad vowed Sunday that he would not change course in the face of what he charged was a “conspiracy” by Western and regional powers against Syria, which has been convulsed by 17 months of bloodshed.
“The Syrian people will not allow this conspiracy to achieve its objectives” and will defeat it “at any price,” Assad said at a meeting with a top official from Iran, Syria’s chief regional ally.
Assad has since March last year been trying through force to smother a popular uprising that has turned into a brutal civil war which has left thousands dead, seen more than 200,000 refugees fleeing to neighbouring countries and 2.5 million in need inside Syria. But despite their far superior fire power, the government forces are struggling to defeat rebels who have built strongholds in many parts of the country, particularly the northern city of Aleppo.
Human rights groups have accused the regime of committing many atrocities during the conflict, and a UN panel said earlier this month it was guilty of crimes against humanity.
Grisly videos issued by opposition activists showed dozens of charred and bloodied bodies lined up in broad daylight in a graveyard in Daraya, and others lying wall-to-wall in rooms in a mosque.
Meanwhile, the head of the Iranian parliament’s foreign policy committee, Aladin Borujerdi, vowed that Tehran will “stick by our Syrian brothers” at a meeting with Assad and Vice President Faruq al-Shara in Damascus.