DAMASCUS, Aug 6, (Agencies): Syria’s prime minister Riad Hijab joined the anti-regime revolt and fled abroad, in what Washington and the opposition hailed on Monday as a major blow to President Bashar al-Assad.
Government forces, meanwhile, were poised to launch an assault on rebels in Aleppo, Syria’s commercial capital.
In the highest-ranking defection of the nearly 17-month uprising, Hijab, a leading Sunni Muslim in Assad’s minority Alawite-dominated regime, announced he was joining the rebels after slipping across the border into Jordan on Sunday night.
He accused his former master of carrying out “genocide” against his own people but said four decades of Assad family rule were collapsing.
“I announce my defection today from the regime of killing and terror, and I join the ranks of the revolt,” Hijab said in statement read by his spokesman Mohammed al-Otri on Al-Jazeera news channel from Amman.
“Syria is passing through the most difficult war crimes, genocide, and barbaric killings and massacres against unarmed citizens,” he said.
Hijab’s home province of Deir Ezzor in the northeast has been one of the key battlegrounds of the conflict and seen a mounting death toll from operations by the army.
The spokesman said Hijab would leave for Qatar within days, following the example of other high-profile defectors such as Syria’s ambassador to Iraq, Nawaf Fares, who switched sides last month.
The latest defection shows Assad has lost control of the country and that his people believe his days are numbered, a US official in Washington told AFP.
The surprise development was “just the latest indication that Assad has lost control of Syria and that the momentum is with the opposition forces and the Syrian people,” National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor said.
The Syrian opposition in Jordan said Otri and his family had slipped over the border during the night accompanied by two government ministers and three army officers.
“The Free Syrian Army helped all of them cross the border... Several other army officers defected and arrived in Jordan last night,” said Syrian National Council member Khalid Zein al-Abedin.

Defections
SNC leader Abdel Basset Sayda said “this defection shows that the regime is disintegrating. It is the beginning of the end,” while the Muslim Brotherhood hailed what it called “a courageous expression of great nationalism.”
In Damascus, state television put out a terse report announcing that Hijab had been dismissed. It said Deputy Prime Minister and Local Government Minister Omar Ghalawanji had been appointed caretaker premier.
The 46-year-old Hijab was only appointed on June 6 following a widely boycotted May 7 parliamentary election that was hailed as a centrepiece of reform by the Assad regime but dismissed as a farce by Arab and Western governments.
An agricultural engineer by training, he was agriculture minister under his predecessor Adel Safar who was appointed in April 2011, shortly after the outbreak of the uprising.
Word of his defection came as the Syrian army readied a major ground assault against rebels in the northern city of Aleppo who say they control half of the city of some 2.7 million people.
It also came as a bomb blast rocked Syrian state television headquarters in the heart of Damascus, wounding several people just two days after the army said it had seized the last rebel-held area of the capital.
The morning bombing struck management offices on the third floor of the television building in the heavily protected Omayyad district of the city.
“It is clear that the blast was caused by an explosive device,” said Information Minister Omran al-Zoabi. “Several of our colleagues were injured, but there were no serious injuries, and no dead.”
In Aleppo, the army bombarded a string of rebel neighbourhoods after government security officials said troops had completed their build-up and that a 20,000-strong force was poised for a ground assault.
A rebel commander was killed in the Salaheddin district in the southwest, and troops shelled the Palace of Justice as well as the Marjeh and Shaar districts, the Observatory said.
In Damascus, deadly clashes broke out in the Sheikh Ibrahim area of Rokn Eddin district, it said.
The head of the UN Supervision Mission in Syria, Lieutenant General Babacar Gaye, on Monday issued an appeal on behalf of civilians, amid fears of a looming bloodbath in Aleppo.
“I urge the parties to protect civilians and respect their obligations under international humanitarian law. Civilians must not be subjected to shelling and use of heavy weapons,” he said.
Another Syrian brigadier general has fled to Turkey to join opposition fighters, accompanied by five high-ranking officers and more than 30 troops, Anatolia reported Monday.
Some 400 Syrian civilians, most of them women and children, also arrived in the company of the soldiers, the agency added.
The latest defection brings the total number of Syrian generals who have left Syria through the Turkish border to 31 since the uprising erupted in mid-March last year.
But some of these generals have gone back to Syria to join the active fighters inside the conflict-torn country, a Turkish official told AFP, refusing to give an exact number of Syrian generals currently on Turkish soil.
Information Minister Omran al-Zohbi on Monday said defections at whatever level would have no impact on the Syrian state, implicitly acknowledging that of prime minister Riad Hijab.
“Syria is a state of institutions and the defection of individuals, whatever their rank, does not change the policy of the state,” Zohbi said without naming Hijab, quoted by official news agency SANA.
But Zohbi denied that other government members had also switched sides in the almost 17-month revolt which has swept Syria, saying “all information on ministerial defections are baseless.”
He was speaking after a cabinet meeting chaired by Deputy Prime Minister Omar Ghalawanji, who was appointed caretaker premier following Hijab’s defection, the agency reported.
Massacre
Syria’s exiled opposition accused the government on Monday of killing 40 people in a massacre in a central town in a bid to terrorise people into flight to change the confessional balance of the region.
The Syrian National Council said that a further 120 people were wounded in the attack by troops and militia on Harbnafsa, in Hama province, a town of some 8,000 inhabitants.
“Regime forces bombarded the town... with tanks and heavy weapons for five hours straight,” the SNC said. “They then stormed the town.”
The group said the government’s “criminality and desire to commit murder and instil terror has reached such a point that the military and security services, as well as the shabiha (loyalist militia) from nearby... villages, chased fleeing townspeople with knives and live ammunition.”
Condemning what it described as a “barbaric massacre,” the SNC said the killings were a result of “a clear policy of displacement.”
Rural areas of Hama province have suffered a series of massacres in recent months, frequently involving pro-government militia, according to opposition activists and human rights monitors.
The province is confessionally mixed, with some areas Sunni Muslim and others made up of members of the minority Alawite community of President Bashar al-Assad.
The opposition accuse the government of deliberately stoking sectarian tensions and of unleashing mainly Alawite militia in a bid to drive out Sunnis.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported the killing of a total of 11 civilians in Harbnafsa, including five children, in violence on Sunday and Monday.
It is impossible to independently verify death tolls out of Syria. The United Nations has stopped giving figures.
Syria’s army shelled rebel-held areas of commercial capital Aleppo on Monday as violence killed 91 people across the country, including 57 civilians, 24 troops and 10 rebels, a watchdog said.
At least 17 civilians were killed in the city of Aleppo, while four were killed elsewhere in the same province, said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
Clashes broke out in the southwestern district of Salaheddin, where a rebel commander and another fighter were killed on Monday after three tanks moved in the night before, said the Britain-based group.
“Rebels and regime forces also clashed fiercely in the Shaar, Hanano and Sakhur districts,” it said, adding that six civilians were killed in Sakhur alone.
Shaar and Sakhur later came under regime shelling, as did the neighbourhoods of Saif al-Dawla and Bab al-Hadid.
The army bombarded the Palace of Justice, as well as the districts of Marjeh and Shaar, killing five people. In Bab al-Nayrab, troops shot dead a civilian while he was helping wounded people, it added.
A group claiming to represent dissident Syrian diplomats has swung behind the revolt against President Bashar al-Assad, calling for a power transfer to a body “representing the Syrian people” and urging more diplomats to join its ranks.
Syrian Diplomats for a Democratic and Civil State includes six or seven diplomats who have defected and others who are still in their positions, said Hosam Hafez, a Syrian diplomat who announced his defection 10 days ago and is acting as coordinator of the group unveiled on Monday.
“We reiterate that we are part of the Syrian state and not the Syrian regime,” the group said in a statement.
“We believe that the security-based solution adopted by the regime to deal with what is basically a legal, civil and political crisis has taken the country to a dark abyss.”
The rate of public defections from the Assad administration has been much slower than the speed at which officials turned their backs on Muammar Gaddafi’s Libyan government last year — something those who have defected attribute to fear.
Hafez said the Syrian government had recalled a large number of diplomats in an apparent move to curb the scope for defections in the foreign ministry.
“Usually we have between 350 and 400 diplomats outside. Now I guess we have much less than half this number in the missions outside,” he said.
Russia’s interior ministry on Monday denied ever issuing a statement saying it had confirmation that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad had been killed together with his wife.
The statement follows the rapid spread of a Twitter message attributed to Russian Interior Minister Vladimir Kolokoltsev saying Assad and his wife had been fatally attacked in the Alawite statelet of Latakia in Syria’s western mountains.
The ministry said that Kolokoltsev is an active Internet user but “does not have a single account on any of the social networks.”
The MiniInterRussia account attributed to the Russian minister later posted a message saying it was a hoax created by an Italian journalist.
Aid
Three prominent US senators called late Sunday for direct US military aid to Syrian rebels, including use of US air power to protect rebel-controlled areas in the country.
The senators — John McCain, Joseph Lieberman and Lindsey Graham - said in an op-ed piece in The Washington Post they were aware of the risks associated with deepening US involvement in the conflict in Syria.
“But inaction carries even greater risks for the United States — in lives lost, strategic opportunities squandered and values compromised,” they argued.
The senators said the United States should “directly and openly” provide assistance to the armed opposition, including weapons, intelligence and training.
“Whatever the risks of our doing so, they are far outweighed by the risks of continuing to sit on our hands, hoping for the best,” they said.
The authors noted that US help should go to those groups that reject extremism and sectarianism in both word and deed.
The senators said the United States should work with its allies to reinforce those areas within Syria that the rebels have established as de facto safe zones.
“This would not require any US troops on the ground but could involve limited use of our airpower and other unique US assets,” they wrote.
The lawmakers did not specify what assets they had in mind.
Qatar and Saudi Arabia are giving light arms to Syria’s rebels but the fighters do not have the advanced weapons needed to confront Bashar al-Assad’s regime, a spokeswoman for the opposition SNC said Monday.
“Rebels on the ground are searching desperately for arms wherever they can find them,” a spokeswoman for the Syrian National Council, Bassma Kodmani, told France’s Europe 1 radio.
“There are certain countries that are providing light and conventional weapons,” she said.
Asked which countries, Kodmani said: “It is Qatar, Saudi Arabia, it is maybe a little bit Libya with what it has left over from its own battle.”
She said some countries were also providing money to the rebels so they could buy weapons on the black market.
But Kodmani said the rebels were still massively outgunned by pro-regime forces and were lacking “more advanced types of weapons that could be used to confront aviation”.
“This is a political decision that the major countries must take, it has not been taken,” she said.
Warning of “carnage” in Syria’s commercial capital Aleppo, Kodmani condemned the political and diplomatic failure to find a solution to the conflict.
“Waiting for a military solution is catastrophic,” she said.
Fighting continued to rage in Syria on Monday, with a bomb blast rocking state television headquarters in the heart of Damascus and the army bombarding a string of rebel neighbourhoods in Aleppo.
Meeting
Iran is to hold a ministerial meeting on Thursday for countries having a “realistic position” on Syria, Deputy Foreign Minister Hossein Amir Abdollahian said, the official news agency IRNA reported.
He said 10 countries would be participating, but did not identify them.
Iran is the main ally of the beleaguered Syrian regime of President Bashar al-Assad, which since March 2011 has been waging a battle against an increasingly armed opposition.
“A consultative meeting on Syria with the presence of a certain number of countries having a principled and realistic position on Syria will be organised Thursday in Tehran,” Abdollahian was quoted as saying on Monday.
“The Islamic Republic of Iran believes that a total halt to the violence, and national dialogue are the solution to control the crisis in Syria and to that end Iran is organising this meeting,” he said.
Iran has repeatedly accused the United States, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar of giving military support to Syria’s rebels. It denies US allegations it is providing military aid to Assad.
“We are asking why the United States and other countries back sending heavy and semi-heavy weapons, while we are seeing the presence of al-Qaeda and an increase in the number of terrorist and violent acts in Syria,” Abdollahian said.