BAB AL-SALAM, Syria, July 22, (Agencies): Syrian forces bombarded parts of Damascus with helicopter gun ships on Sunday, witnesses said, driving rebels out of a northern district a week after opposition fighters launched a major assault on the capital.

Members of a Syrian army division under the command of President Bashar al-Assad’s brother summarily executed several young men, a witness and opposition activists said.

In a further escalation of a conflict that opponents of Assad have turned into all-out civil war, fighting raged around the intelligence headquarters in the biggest city Aleppo and in Deir al-Zor in the east.

Syrian forces regained control of one of two border crossings seized by rebels on the frontier with Iraq, Iraqi officials said, but rebels said they had captured a third border crossing with Turkey, Bab al-Salam north of Aleppo.

“Seizing the border crossings does not have strategic importance but it has a psychological impact because it demoralises Assad’s force,” a senior Syrian army defector in Turkey, Staff Brigadier Faiz Amr, told Reuters by phone.

“It’s a show of progress for the revolutionaries, despite the superior firepower of Assad’s troops.”
Rebels

The rebels said they lost 12 men and 40 were wounded during a 24-day siege they mounted to take the Bab al-Salam border post. The rebel commanding officer in the area, Abu Omar, said they took the crossing point on Sunday without a fight.

“There were two armoured vehicles at the gate and they escaped. This is a safe zone for us and we don’t expect the army to come and attack,” said Omar. “Eighty percent of the area here is in rebel hands anyway,” he added.

The bombardments in Damascus and Deir al-Zor were some of the fiercest yet and showed Assad’s determination to avenge a bomb on Wednesday that killed four members of his high command.
It was the gravest blow in a 16-month-old uprising that has turned into an armed revolt against four decades of Assad rule.

Rebels were driven from Mezzeh, the diplomatic district of Damascus, residents and opposition activists said, and more than 1,000 government troops and allied militiamen poured into the area, backed by armoured vehicles, tanks and bulldozers.

Three people were killed and 50 others, mostly civilians, were wounded in the early morning bombardment, said Thabet, a Mezzeh resident. “The district is besieged and the wounded are without medical care,” he said.

“I saw men stripped to their underwear. Three buses took detainees from al-Farouk, including women and whole families. Several houses have been set on fire.”

The neighbourhood of Barzeh, one of three northern areas hit by helicopter fire, was overrun by troops from the Fourth Division, commanded by Assad’s younger brother, Maher al-Assad, 41, who is widely seen as the muscle maintaining the Assad family’s Alawite minority rule.

“At least 20 Fourth Division tanks and hundreds of its members entered Barzeh this afternoon,” opposition activist Abu Kais said by phone from the district.

“I saw troops go into the home of 26-year-old Issa al-Arab. They left him dead with two bullets in his head. Seventeen-year-old Issa Wahbeh was pulled from a shelter and beaten and killed. Four other males in their 20s were killed this way,”

Crucial
His role has become more crucial since Assad’s defence and intelligence ministers, a top general and his powerful brother-in-law were killed by the bomb on Wednesday, part of a “Damascus volcano” by rebels seeking to turn the tables in a revolt inspired by Arab Spring uprisings in Tunisia, Libya and Egypt.
Assad has not spoken in public since the bombing. Diplomats and opposition sources said government forces were focusing on strategic centres, with one Western diplomat comparing Assad to a doctor “abandoning the patient’s limbs to save the organs”.

Assad is still in Damascus and retains the loyalty of his armed forces, the Israeli military said, after questions had been raised about the Syrian leader’s whereabouts. Syrian state television quoted a media source denying that helicopters had fired on the capital. “The situation in Damascus is normal, but the security forces are pursuing the remnants of the terrorists in some streets,” it said.

Assad’s forces, who also pushed into a rebel-held district in the northerly commercial hub of Aleppo on Saturday, targeted pockets of lightly armed rebels, who moved about the streets on foot, attacking security installations and roadblocks.

Other opposition and rebel sources say the guerrilla fighters in the capital may lack the supply lines to remain there for long and may have to stage ‘tactical withdrawals’.

Residents said the shelling was so intense at dusk they could not discern the traditional cannon blast marking the end of the daily fast for the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

On Sunday opposition activists reported fighting in Jdeidet Artouz, a suburb southwest of Damascus, 30 km (20 miles) from the occupied Golan Heights, captured by Israel in 1967. Tanks entered the suburb in the morning, they said.

Israel and Syria’s other neighbours are increasingly fearful the conflict could tear through an already unstable region.

The Iraqi army sent extra border guards and officers on Sunday to the Qaim-Albu Kamal border crossing with Syria captured by the rebels on Thursday. The border was sealed by the Iraqi army on Friday, fearing a spillover in violence and Iraq’s government has said it cannot help Syrians fleeing the violence.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said 1,261 people had been killed across Syria since last Sunday when the fighting escalated in Damascus, including 299 of Assad’s forces, making it by far the bloodiest week in an uprising that has claimed the lives of 18,000 people

A total of 180 people, including 48 troops, died on Saturday alone, many them in Homs province, epicentre of the revolt.

Most shops in Damascus were closed and there was only light traffic — although more than in the past few days. Some police checkpoints, abandoned earlier in the week, were manned again.

Many petrol stations were closed, having run out of fuel, and those that were open had huge lines of cars waiting to fill up. Residents reported long queues at bakeries.

Revolt
A bloody crackdown on what began as a peaceful revolt has increasingly become an armed conflict between an establishment dominated by Assad’s Alawite minority, an offshoot of Shiite Islam, and rebels drawn largely from the Sunni majority.

Opposition activists in Aleppo said hundreds of families were fleeing residential areas on Saturday after the military swept into the Saladin district, which had been in rebel hands for two days. Fighting was also reported in the densely-populated, poor neighbourhood of al-Sakhour.

“For the first time we feel Aleppo has turned into a battle zone,” a woman, who declined to be named, said by phone from the city.

On the Iraqi-Syrian border, Iraqi security and border officials said Syrian forces had reasserted control over the Yarubiya crossing point on the Syrian side of the frontier, briefly seized by rebels on Saturday.
Syrian opposition activists said several towns in Syria’s Kurdish northeast had passed without a fight into local hands in recent days as central authority eroded.

Arsenal
In Jerusalem, Israel would “have to act” if the Syrian regime collapses and there’s a risk Syria’s chemical weapons and missiles could fall into the hands of militant groups, Israel’s prime minister warned Sunday.

The deteriorating situation of President Bashar Assad’s regime is stoking Israeli fears that militants affiliated with Lebanon’s Hezbollah group or the al-Qaeda terror network could raid Syrian military arsenals for chemicals weapons or missiles that could strike Israel.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel hasn’t considered specifically trying to cross the border to seize the weapons. “There are other possibilities,” he said in an interview on “Fox News Sunday.”

Over the weekend, Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak said Israel would be prepared to attack Syrian weapons arsenals should the need arise.

Netanyahu said preventing Syria’s weapons from falling into the wrong hands is key to Israeli security.
“Could you imagine Hezbollah, the people who are conducting with Iran all these terror attacks around the world — could you imagine them having chemical weapons? It would be like al-Qaeda having chemical weapons,” he said. “It’s something that is not acceptable to us, not acceptable to the United States and to any peaceable country in the world.”

“So I think that this is something we’ll have to act to stop if the need arises. And the need might arise if there’s a regime collapse, but not a regime change,” he said.

When asked whether Israel was prepared to act alone, Netanyahu said Syria’s stockpile was a “common concern” and that “we’d have to see if there was a common action to address that concern.”
Netanyahu said he believes the fall of the regime is inevitable, but that it could take days, weeks or months.

Also Sunday, Amos Gilad, a senior Israeli Defense Ministry official, told Israel’s Army Radio that “right now, they (the Syrian regime) are maintaining control of these arsenals as best they can.”
Barak made it clear that Israel is preparing for the worst. “I’ve ordered the Israeli military to prepare for a situation where we would have to weigh the possibility of carrying out an attack” against Syrian weapons arsenals, he told Channel 2 TV on Friday.

On Sunday, he told reporters, “the state of Israel cannot accept a situation where advanced weapons systems are transferred from Syria to Lebanon.”

The possibility that the bloodshed in Syria could spill over Israel’s frontier has become an even more tangible worry as the fighting intensifies in Assad’s strongholds and near the frontier with the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights. Israel captured the territory from Syria in the 1967 Mideast war.

Barak warned last week that Israel would stop Syrian refugees from entering the Golan should they try to flee there.

The head of military intelligence voiced concern that Syrian territory bordering the Golan could become a haven for militant groups, much like Egypt’s Sinai desert has become a launching pad for attacks on southern Israel.

Defense officials have said Israeli troops in the Golan have not been put on a war footing.
Caught in the middle are Druse Arab students from the Golan Heights. Druse families have asked the International Committee of the Red Cross to evacuate their children studying in universities in the Syrian capital — but the agency cannot do that because of the fierce fighting there, according to Ran Goldstein, a spokesman for the Red Cross in Tel Aviv.

Officials estimate that 100 to 200 Druse students remain in Syria. They say about 40 returned to the Golan last month.

Druse Arab students receive permits to cross into Syria for university studies that the Syrian government underwrites.

Missiles
Meanwhile, Turkey sent batteries of ground-to-air missiles to the border with Syria on Sunday, media reports said, boosting its firepower as rebels in Syria seized several border posts.

As fighting raged in Damascus and Aleppo, rebels were said to have taken control of three crossing points on the border with Turkey, which is sheltering thousands of Syrians who have fled the conflict at home.

A train convoy carrying several batteries of missiles arrived in Mardin in southeastern Turkey and will be transferred to several army units deployed on the border, according to the Anatolia news agency.

Television footage showed at least five vehicles in the convoy were carrying air defence missiles, in the latest show of force by Syria’s one-time ally which is now a fervent critic of President Bashar al-Assad’s regime.

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan warned last month after the downing of a military jet initially blamed on Damascus that it now regarded Syria as a “clear and imminent threat”.

Syria has in turn accused Turkey of sheltering rebels and training and supplying militants fighting the regime in a conflict that erupted in March 2011 and has now claimed at least 19,000 lives according to activists.

Meanwhile, Syrian rebels were now in control of the Jarabulus, Bab al-Hawa and Al-Salama posts along the nearly 900-kilometre (560-mile) frontier with Turkey, a diplomat and Anatolia said.

An amateur video showed armed men celebrating the takeover of the Al-Salama post, north of Aleppo, which the diplomat said occurred early Sunday.

The crossing faces the Turkish border post of Oncupinar near Kilis in the southeast, where refugees at a camp there clashed with Turkish police after demonstrating over their living conditions.

The video footage supplied by the shows one fighter, who identifies himself as spokesman for the “Northern Storm Brigade” of the rebel Free Syrian Army, said the border post was now under their control.
“Bab al-Salama has been liberated from the hands of Assad’s mafia, after a suffocating siege on them,” he said, without giving his name.

Regime forces “withdrew after suffering losses”, he added, describing Turkey as a “sister nation.”

Summit

Saudi Arabia has called for an extraordinary summit of Muslim leaders to be held next month to address risks of “sedition” threatening Muslim countries, state news agency SPA reported on Sunday.

Saudi King Abdullah has called for “an extraordinary Islamic solidarity meeting to ensure... unity during this delicate time as the Muslim world faces dangers of fragmentation and sedition,” SPA quoted Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal as saying.
King Abdullah wishes to convene the summit in mid-August in a bid at “unifying the ranks” of Muslims, the report said. There were no further details concerning the agenda of the meeting.
But the announcement comes amid a spike in deadly violence across Syria, where more than 19,000 have been killed since an uprising erupted in March 2011 against the regime of President Bashar al-Assad.
Saudi Arabia and the other energy-rich Sunni nations of the Gulf have repeatedly voiced support for Syrian rebels against the regime of Assad, a member of the Alawite community, an offshoot of Shiite Islam.
In a separate statement, SPA reported that the Saudi monarch has called for launching a campaign to raise funds “in support of our brothers in Syria” starting on Monday.
“The donations will be from all the kingdom’s regions” urging all Saudis “to participate in the campaign.”
Saudi Arabia hosts the headquarters of the 57-member pan-Muslim body — the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation which is based in the Red Sea city of Jeddah.
An activist group says more than 2,750 people have been killed in Syria so far this month, bringing the death toll since the conflict began to more than 19,000.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights says if the current pace of killing continues through the end of July, it will be the deadliest month since the Syrian uprising erupted in March 2011.
Observatory chief Rami Abdul-Rahman said Sunday that 2,752 people — 1,933 civilians, 738 government troops and 81 rebels — were killed in the first 21 days of July.
Abdul-Rahman said June had been the deadliest month with 2,924 deaths.
The average daily death toll in June was 94, while this month it has increased to an average of 131 a day.