Fierce fighting rocked northern Syria on Friday as neighbouring Turkey kept up its calls for internationally protected safe havens inside Syria to stem the massive outflow of refugees.
Clashes erupted in the battleground city of Aleppo, less than 50 kilometres (30 miles) from the Turkish border, while rebel fighters attacked the Abu Zohur air base in Idlib province on the border where they claimed to have shot down a MiG warplane on Thursday, a human rights group said.
Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu expressed frustration at the reluctance of even its Western allies to heed its calls for protected camps inside Syrian territory to cope with the rapidly swelling numbers of civilians fleeing the fighting.
The United Nations estimates that in Aleppo alone at least 200,000 of the city’s 2.7 million population have fled since the city became a major battleground between troops and rebels on July 20.
Rebels attacked a security service building in west Aleppo before dawn on Friday, and clashes erupted in the battleground districts of Saif al-Dawla and Salaheddin in the southwest and Hanano in the northeast, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
In Idlib province, rebels seized part of the Abu Zohur air base in heavy clashes, the Britain-based watchdog said.
The rebels say that aircraft from the base have been used by President Bashar al-Assad’s regime to launch devastating strikes on rebel-held areas, and on Thursday a Free Syrian Army commander said his fighters had downed a MiG warplane based there.
“A MiG was shot down this morning by our men using automatic weapons, shortly after taking off from Abu Zohur military airport,” Colonel Afif Mahmoud Suleiman told AFP. The government has acknowledged two previous aircraft crashes but blamed mechanical failures. It made no immediate comment on the latest claim.
The Abu Zohur area saw some of the heaviest loss of life on Thursday, with 20 civilians, eight of them children, killed there among 119 dead nationwide, the Observatory said.
The total death toll since the uprising against Assad’s rule erupted in March last year now tops 26,000, the watchdog added.
Davutoglu told the Security Council Thursday to act “without delay” to set up safe havens, warning that 80,000 Syrians are already in camps in Turkey, with 4,000 crossing the border each day.
“How long are we going to sit and watch while an entire generation is being wiped out by random bombardment and deliberate mass targeting?” he demanded, slamming the Security Council’s failure to act.
But world powers failed to reach an agreement on his proposal which would imply authorising a highly controversial protective military operation. Britain’s Foreign Secretary William Hague held a joint news conference with France’s Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius to warn that there are “considerable difficulties” with the idea of protected enclaves for civilians.
“We are excluding no option for the future. We do not know how this crisis will develop,” Hague said. “It is steadily getting worse. We are ruling nothing out, we have contingency planning for a wide range of scenarios.
“But we also have to be clear that anything like a safe zone requires military intervention and that of course is something that has to be weighed very carefully.”
But in talks with Syrian Prime Minister Wael al-Halaqi in Tehran on Friday, Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei — the Assad regime’s closest ally — renewed allegations that Washington and its regional allies, including Israel, were responsible for the conflict.
“The main and behind-the-scenes operators behind the painful issues in Syria are America and the Zionist regime,” Khamenei said at the meeting on the sidelines of a Non-Aligned Movement summit in Tehran.
“The main operators in the Syrian issue are those who have been flooding weapons into Syria and financially backing the irresponsible groups,” he added, according to his website.
