Syrian rebels push into Damascus

Syrian rebels fired grenades at tanks and troops while regime armour shelled areas of Damascus, sending terrified families fleeing the most sustained and widespread fighting in the capital since the start of the uprising 16 months ago.

A ring of fierce clashes nearly encircled the heavily-guarded capital as rebels seeking to overthrow President Bashar Assad pushed the civil war that has been building in Syria’s impoverished provinces closer to the seat of power.

While the clashes were focused in a string of neighbourhoods in the city’s south west, for many of its four million people the violence brought scarily close to home the strife that has deeply scarred other Syrian cities.

In upmarket cafes frequented by the business and government elite tightly bound to the Assad regime, customers watched as black smoke billowed on the horizon and the boom of government shells reverberated in the distance.

“Without a doubt, this is all anyone is talking about today,” a Damascus activist who gave his name as Noor Bitar said via Skype. “The sounds of war are clear throughout the city. They are bouncing off the buildings.”

Syria’s violence has grown increasingly bloody and chaotic in recent months as the uprising has morphed from a peaceful protest movement seeking political change into an armed insurgency seeking to topple the regime by force.

Anti-regime activists say more than 17,000 people have been killed and the government says it has lost more than 4,000 security officers. It does not provide numbers of civilian dead.

International diplomacy has failed to stop the violence and world powers remain deeply divided over who is responsible and how to stop it. The US and many Western nations have called on Assad to leave power, while Russia, China and Iran have stood by the regime.

Yesterday Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov accused the West of using blackmail to secure a United Nations Security Council resolution that could allow the use of force in Syria.

Mr Lavrov objected to the text of a Western-backed resolution that calls for sanctions and invokes Chapter 7 of the UN Charter, which can be enforceable militarily.

He said Russia had been told that if it opposed the resolution, Western nations would not extend the mandate of a UN mission sent to Syria to monitor a ceasefire.

“We consider it to be an absolutely counter-productive and dangerous approach,” Mr Lavrov said.

International envoy Kofi Annan, who has made little progress in brokering a political solution in Syria, met Russian leaders in Moscow yesterday. The meeting – the latest in Mr Annan’s efforts to save his faltering peace plan - comes a day after the conflict crossed an important symbolic threshold, with the international Red Cross formally declaring it a civil war.

Yesterday’s fighting suggested that deep cracks were appearing in the tightly-controlled facade of calm that has insulated Damascus from violence throughout the uprising.

Damascus – and Syria’s largest city, Aleppo – are both home to elites who have benefited from close ties to Assad’s regime, as well as merchant classes and minority groups who worry their status will suffer if Assad falls.

But for months, rebels have been gaining strength in poorer towns and cities in the Damascus countryside. Some activists suggested yesterday that recent government crackdowns in those areas had pushed rebels into the city, where they were determined to strike at the heart of the regime.

“It seems there is a new strategy to bring the fighting into the centre of the capital,” said Mustafa Osso. “The capital used to be safe. This will trouble the regime.”

Another activist, who gave only his first name, Moaz, said he had never seen such violent fighting in his neighbourhood of Tadamon, a poor, densely-populated area south of the city.

He said the army had parked armoured vehicles at the neighbourhood’s entrances and posted tanks on its north and south edges.

About two-thirds of the neighbourhood’s residents had fled, while those who remained were scared government snipers would target them if they left now, he said.

But so far, the rebels had kept the army out, destroying three tanks and one armoured car with rocket-propelled grenades, said Moaz.

Amateur videos posted online yesterday gave glimpses of the fighting. In one, a dozen fighters crouched behind sandbags, firing at a tank down a rubble-strewn street with a machine gun and rocket-propelled grenades.

Another video showed a burned estate car with at least three charred bodies inside that an off-camera narrator said were government troops.

The fiercest fighting was in the south-west neighbourhoods of Mezzeh, Kfar Souseh, Midan, Tadamon, Nahr Aisha and al-Zahira, while activists also reported clashes in the western suburbs and in the northern neighbourhood of Barzeh.

British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said 12 people were killed in and around Damascus, among some 90 people killed nationwide. About a third of the dead were government troops, it said.

Activist claims and videos could not be independently verified. The Syrian government bars most media from working in the country.

The government said little about the clashes, but the state news agency said the army was hunting an “armed terrorist group” in one of the neighbourhoods. The regime blames the uprising on terrorists acting out a foreign conspiracy to weaken the country.