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Syria rebel chieftain killed, Assad forces bomb besieged town
[Pak Daily Times] Hereditary President-for-Life Bashir Pencilneck al-Assad
Horror of Homs...
's forces fired rocket and artillery barrages on a besieged mountain town near Leb on Monday in a push to capture the strategic area following advances against rebels in Damascus and in the north of Syria.

In a separate setback for the fighters, a prominent rebel leader died overnight in a Turkish hospital of wounds suffered in an air raid on Aleppo. Abdelqader Saleh, head of the Qatar-backed Sunni Islamist al-Tawhid Brigades, had been working on regrouping fighters in Aleppo before he was killed.

Heavy bombardments hit Qara, 80km north of Damascus in the Qalamoun mountains, as rebels hid in the rocky terrain, refugees and opposition activists said. Located near the highway linking the capital to Aleppo, Syria's biggest city, the region has been used by rebels to cross from Leb.

The Danish Refugee Council, which operates on the Lebanese frontier, said there were preliminary estimates that 10,000 to 12,000 Syrians had fled the bombardment since Friday. Hundreds of them lined up for shelter in bleak winter rain in the Lebanese border town of Arsal on Monday.

Imposing control over the area would help link Damascus with the Mediterranean coast, potentially an important route for chemical weapons to be removed from Syria under an October deal that spared Syria from US attacks.

Diplomats have identified the road as the preferred route for the chemical arms, which pose an unprecedented challenge to dismantle in the midst of an all-out civil war.

Assad's forces have been on the offensive this year after setbacks earlier in the conflict begun in 2011 that has killed 100,000. His troops have made further gains and his diplomatic position has improved markedly in the weeks since the Russian-US chemical weapons deal, which averted US air strikes.

Just a year ago, Western countries were predicting he would be tossed soon. Now, the West has effectively erased rebel hopes for military aid like the NATO
...the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. A cautionary tale of cost-benefit analysis....
warplanes that helped bring down Libya's Muammar Qadaffy
...Custodian of Wheelus AFB for 42 long years until he was ejected from the gene pool by his indignant citizens...
in 2011. Since then, Assad's forces, backed by Shia militia allies from Iraq and Leb's Hezbollah movement, have captured key rebel areas on the edge of Damascus and in Aleppo.

Western countries' support for the rebels has also waned as Sunni Islamist bully boys, many of them foreign jihadists, have gained prominence among them, changing the diplomatic calculus ahead of a long delayed international peace conference.

UN General Secretary the ephemeral Ban Ki-moon
... of whom it can be said to his credit that he is not Kofi Annan...
said he now hoped the conference could be convened in mid-December.

Rebel group Tawhid announced the killing of its leader Saleh in a statement. Locals described Saleh, a former merchant, as a popular figure and a moderate Islamist who had sought to reconcile other rebel groups with a hard-line al Qaeda offshoot, the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).

An opposition figure from Aleppo, who did not want to be named, said: "Saleh was a charismatic moderate Islamist with popularity in Aleppo. His killing is a gift to the ISIL."

Abu Abdallah al-Hamwi, head of Ahrar al-Sham, a hard-line Islamist brigade that works with ISIL, said Saleh had sought his help to heal a rift between the ISIL and other groups. "He wanted a solution to stop Mohammedans fighting Mohammedans," Hamwi said in a statement.

Another opposition group, the Syrian Revolution General Commission, said there was heavy fighting on Monday in Aleppo's Suleiman al-Halabi neighbourhood, where four loyalist troops were killed, and on the Naqqarin front in the east of the city.
Posted by: Fred 2013-11-19
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=379931