Syrian security forces carried out a spate of raids in Damascus Tuesday after a deadly bombing hit the capital and UN chief Ban Ki-Moon warned the search for peace was at a “pivotal moment.”
State television said the late Monday blast hit a restaurant in the Qaboon neighbourhood of the capital. The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said five people were killed. In all, at least 59 people were killed nationwide on Monday, including 31 loyalist troops who died in clashes with rebel fighters, the Observatory said. The bloodshed raged despite the deployment of a UN military observer mission to oversee a promised ceasefire that has been breached daily since it went into force on April 12.
Gunfire erupted as a team of UN observers visited the town of Busayra in Deir Ezzor province in the northeast, activists reached by Skype told AFP. “Unconfirmed reports indicate there are two dead and several wounded,” one activist said. The Observatory said dozens of people were arrested in the pre-dawn raids in several suburbs of the capital, including Douma, Harasta and Barzen.
It said powerful blasts were heard overnight in a number of provincial cities, including central Hama, northern Aleppo and the coastal cities of Banias and Latakia. The watchdog said there were also fierce clashes between regime forces and rebels in the town of Kfar Roma in Idlib province in the northwest. Demonstrations broke out at dawn in several neighbourhoods of Aleppo, the country’s second city and commercial hub which until recently had been largely spared the unrest shaking the country since March last year.
One person was killed by gunfire in Nouaymeh, a town in the southern province of Daraa, the Observatory said. The UN chief issued a new warning of the dangers of all-out civil war as the 14-month uprising against President Bashar al-Assad’s regime has turned into an armed rebellion. “The secretary general said we were at a pivotal moment in the search for a peaceful settlement to the crisis and that he remained extremely troubled about the risk of an all-out civil war,” a spokesman for Ban said at a NATO summit in Chicago on Monday. NATO, which undertook a major air war in Libya to back rebels who fought Moamer Kadhafi’s forces last year, has said it has “no intention” of taking military action against Assad’s regime. NATO states have come under criticism for backing the air war in Libya but ruling out military intervention in Syria, where opposition demonstrators and badly outgunned rebels have been hammered by heavily-armed regime forces.
