Assad shooting rumours spark media frenzy
However, online reports of Assad’s death appeared exaggerated last night.
Arab media initially said Assad was shot by one of his Iranian bodyguards, named as Mehdi Jacoby, on Saturday night and was in serious condition.
He was supposedly taken to Al-Shami Hospital in Damascus, where surrounding roads were closed off.
Israel News One’s website even reported that Assad had been “assassinated”.
However, online updates from Assad’s inner circle said the Syrian leader’s shooting was false and that he was alive and in high spirits. The conflicting reports highlight the chaos that continues to engulf the country, which has been mired in a bloody civil war for two years.
In the latest turn of events yesterday, the leader of the Western-backed Syrian opposition coalition announced that he was stepping down.
Moaz al-Khatib did not reveal what motivated his decision, according to a statement on Facebook.
However, he said he now has the ability to “work with freedom that cannot be available within the official institutions.”
Al-Khatib also said the international community has failed to adequately support the rebels’ fight against Assad.
The US has provided $114m (€88m) in aid to the Syrian opposition, the US ambassador to Syria told Congress earlier this month — a higher figure than previously stated.
US secretary of state John Kerry, who made a surprise visit to Iraq yesterday, said he was not shocked to see al-Khatib resign.
“I have appreciated his leadership, but the notion that he might resign has frankly been expressed by him on many different occasions in many different places, and it is not a surprise,” Kerry said.
Kerry also said he expressed to Iraqi prime minister Nuri al-Maliki American concerns about Iranian flights over Iraq carrying arms to Syria.
Washington believes such flights and overland transfers take place nearly every day and help Assad’s war effort.
Kerry said he had told Maliki the Iranian flights through Iraqi airspace were “problematic”.
Meanwhile, Israel said it fired into Syria yesterday and destroyed a machinegun position in the Golan Heights from where shots had been fired at Israeli soldiers in a further spillover of the Syrian civil war along a tense front.
It was not immediately clear whether Israel held Syrian troops or rebels responsible for what a spokesman for prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said had been a deliberate attack on Israeli patrols in the occupied territory.
Israeli forces “destroyed a Syrian machinegun nest that fired twice in the last 24 hours on Israeli patrols operating to safeguard the border,” the spokesman, Ofir Gendelman, said on his Twitter page.
Shells have fallen several times inside Israeli-controlled territory during Syria’s civil war. Some of the incidents have drawn Israeli return fire.
Syria’s southern provinces bordering Jordan and Israel have become an increasingly significant battleground as the capital Damascus comes into play.
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