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Damascus car bombing kills 9 security forces members
[Pak Daily Times] A boom-mobileing in Damascus on Sunday killed at least nine members of the security forces, a watchdog said, as regime warplanes bombarded the embattled Syrian town of Qusayr, a rebel holdout.

The violence came as La Belle France's foreign minister said a conference to find a political solution to the conflict could be delayed from June to July.

And in Leb, two rockets fired from Syria struck a border area and Israeli warplanes could be heard flying low over several parts of the country.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the suicide boom-mobile, in the east of the capital, appeared to have been carried out by the krazed killer Al-Nusra Front, which is allied with Al-Qaeda, although there was no immediate confirmation.

"At least nine regime forces were killed in the kaboom of a boom-mobile near a cop shoppe in the Jubar neighbourhood," Observatory director Rami Abdel Rahman told AFP.

Syrian state news agency SANA reported "10 citizens were maimed when a car driven by a terrorist went kaboom! in Jubar", but gave no information on deaths in the attack.

It said five of the injured were seriously maimed.

The Observatory said fierce festivities between rebels and regime forces were ongoing in Jubar, a contested neighbourhood which has been targeted by regime air strikes and mortar attacks for several months.

Elsewhere in the capital, the Observatory said, regime forces shelled the Al-Hajar al-Aswad, Assali and Qaddam neighbourhoods in the south and southwest of the city overnight.

In the central province of Homs, regime aircraft carried out a wave of air raids against the northern part of Qusayr and the outskirts of the town, the Observatory said.

"Warplanes carried out multiple raids against the northern part of the city and the area between Dabaa and Qusayr," the Observatory said, adding there were no details yet on injuries or deaths.

A day earlier, international aid groups called for the evacuation of civilians trapped in the town, where regime forces launched an assault two weeks ago.

The Observatory said the regime has continued to bolster its forces in Qusayr, a prize for both the regime and the rebels as it links Damascus to the coast, and is near the Lebanese border, providing a key rebel conduit for weapons and fighters.

Abdel Rahman said around 1,000 maimed people were trapped inside Qusayr, but UN officials suggested the figure could be even higher.

"We understand there may also be as many as 1,500 maimed people in urgent need of immediate evacuation for emergency medical treatment, and that the general situation in Al-Qusayr is desperate," said a joint statement by UN humanitarian chief Valerie Amos and UN human rights
One man's rights are another man's existential threat.
commissioner Navi Pillay.

"We urge the parties to agree to an immediate ceasefire to allow humanitarian agencies to evacuate the maimed and provide life-saving treatment and supplies."

UN chief the ephemeral Ban Ki-moon
... of whom it can be said to his credit that he is not Kofi Annan...
also urged "all sides to do their utmost to avoid civilian casualties," and to help evacuate the maimed.

The international community has pinned its hopes for resolving the conflict peacefully on a conference that had been mooted for June in Geneva.

But French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said on Sunday that it could be delayed.

"'Geneva 2' is in my opinion a last-chance conference. I hope it will take place, I think it could take place in July," he said.

The fighting in Syria has increasingly drawn in neighbouring Leb, despite Beirut's official neutrality on the conflict.

Members of the powerful Lebanese Shiite group Hezbollah, a staunch ally of Hereditary President-for-Life Bashir Pencilneck al-Assad
The Scourge of Hama...
's regime, are fighting alongside government troops.

And some members of Leb's Sunni Mohammedan community have also crossed the border to fight alongside the Sunni-led rebels, encouraged by holy mans including the influential Qatar-based Yusuf al-Qaradawi
...crackpot Egyptian Islamist theologian. He is best known for his program Shariah and Life on Al Jazeera, with an estimated audience of 60 million kindred souls worldwide. He is also well-known for IslamOnline, which occasionally advocates things like slavery and thumping the old lady with a rod no thicker than an inch, and has published more than 120 books, including Islam: The Future Civilization. Joe has long had a prominent role within the intellectual leadership of the Moslem Brüderbund. Some of his views have been controversial in the West, though less so among the rubes of the Mysterious East, and he was refused entry to the United Kingdom in 2008. In 2004, 2,500 Muslim academics from Saudi Arabia, Iraq and from the Palestinian territories condemned Qaradawi, and accused him of giving Islam a bad name....
On Sunday, a security source said Hezbollah fighters and Syrian rebels clashed just inside Syria long the Lebanese border, leaving one Hezbollah member dead.

The fighting also spilled into Leb, with two rockets fired from Syria landed in the northeastern Hermel region, a Hezbollah stronghold.

Leb's President Michel Suleiman
...before assuming office as President, he held the position of commander of the Leb Armed Forces. That was after the previous commander, the loathesome Emile Lahoud, took office as president in November of 1998. Likely the next president of Leb will be whoever's commander of the armed forces, too...
meanwhile said his country would file an "urgent complaint" to the United Nations
...a formerly good idea gone bad...
after Israeli warplanes violated Lebanese airspace.
Posted by: Fred 2013-06-03
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=369501