(Reuters) – The Syrian army pressed its offensive against rebels on Tuesday, bombarding the suburban Damascus city of Douma, while President Bashar al-Assad said he wished his forces had not shot down a Turkish warplane two weeks ago.
The downing of the Turkish F4 in disputed circumstances aggravated tensions between Damascus and Ankara, which responded with high-profile military moves to ward off Syrian helicopters from Turkey’s border zone where rebels and refugees are camped.
A Syrian general and 84 soldiers were the latest to defect and flee to Turkey on Monday. But analysts say army and government defections have so far made barely a dent in Assad’s armor.
There were few signs that diplomacy might stem Syria’s 16-month-old conflict, in which Syrian opposition leaders say more than 15,000 people have been killed. World powers at the weekend made a show of unity by pledging to back talks on a transitional government. But they failed to narrow differences between the West and Russia over Western demands that Assad must go.
Neither Assad’s government nor the groups trying to topple him have shown much interest in peaceful compromise. Instead, they seem to be digging in for a winner-take-all struggle.
Anti-Assad activists said there was no let-up in violence across the country.
“There was heavy shelling all morning, now it has calmed down a bit but the siege of the city continues,” said Abu Rami, an activist in Homs, the central city which has borne the brunt of the army onslaught against rebel strongholds.
“We are living with little food and little water,” he said.
In Damascus suburbs and villages adjacent to Douma, the army shelled pro-opposition areas to which Douma residents fled at the weekend, according to Omar Hamzeh, spokesman for the revolutionary council of rural Damascus.
He said Erbeen, Hamoreyah and Mazare’a came under fire and at least six people were killed during the morning.
EXISTENCE AT STAKE
General Fahd Jassem al-Freij, Chief of the General Staff of the Army and the Armed Forces, was quoted as saying Syria is engaged in war in which conspirators are seeking to destroy its unity and end its existence.
The official news agency SANA quoted him as saying Syria had dealt positively with all Arab and international initiatives to find a settlement, but its enemies had replied with escalation on the ground, coupled with media frenzy to disrupt normal life.
In Cairo, Arab states and Turkey urged Syria’s divided opposition on Monday to come together and form a credible alternative to the Assad government, but rifts swiftly emerged.
The talks are being boycotted by the Free Syrian Army, which is leading the armed struggle against Assad. The two-day meeting was organized by the Arab League to try to rally Syria’s opposition, whose chronic infighting has scared off potential foreign backers.
“It is not acceptable to waste this opportunity in any way. The sacrifices of the Syrian people are bigger than us all and more precious than any differences or individual and party interests,” Arab League Secretary-General Nabil Elaraby said, addressing the roughly 200 Syrian politicians and activists.
ARM “THE REBELS”?
A meeting in Paris this coming Friday of the loose alliance known as the Friends of Syria is likely see the United States in particular come under greater pressure from Turkey and the Syrian opposition’s Arab allies – principally Saudi Arabia and the Gulf state of Qatar – to increase aid to the rebels.
Washington has long worried about the wisdom of backing Syria’s opposition, which it sees as ill-organized, disparate and much too close to al Qaeda-linked militants.
“We’re concerned about pouring more weapons into an already over-militarized situation,” U.S. State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said on Monday. “We’ve made our decision.
Assad meanwhile told a Turkish newspaper he wished Syrian forces had not shot down a Turkish jet on June 22 and he would not allow the tensions to turn into open combat.
“We learned that it (the plane) belonged to Turkey after shooting it down. I say 100 percent ‘if only we had not shot it down’,” the Cumhuriyet newspaper quoted Assad as saying in an interview published on Tuesday.
Syrian helicopters bombarded Douma on Monday and Turkey scrambled warplanes near the border far to the north, as the U.N. human rights chief warned that arms supplies to the rebels and the government were deepening the conflict.
Assad also said Syria would not mass military forces along the Turkish border, whatever action Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan’s government took.
Assad also said Syria would not shy away from apologizing if it emerged that the plane was downed in international airspace.
“The plane was using a corridor which Israeli planes have used three times before. Soldiers shot it down because we did not see it on our radar and because information was not given.
“Of course I might have been happy if this had been an Israeli plane,” Assad added.
New York-based Human Rights Watch issued a report detailing what it said was “an archipelago” of Syrian state torture centers and the methods used. It included accounts from victims who were beaten with batons and cables, burned with acid, sexually assaulted, and had their fingernails torn out.
The United Nations has not released an estimate of the overall death toll since May, when it said some 10,000 people had been killed. But the Syrian Expatriate Organisation said the figure was now more than 16,000 while Riad Saif of the opposition Syrian National Council put it at more than 20,000, accounting for corpses buried in mass graves and gardens.
(Reporting by Mariam Karouny in Beirut, Peter Apps in London, Daren Butler in Istanbul, Edmund Blair in Cairo; writing by Douglas Hamilton, editing by Mark Heinrich)
