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Syria-Lebanon-Iran
Blasts Rock Homs as 65 Killed across Syria
2012-03-26
[An Nahar] Blasts rocked the flashpoint city of Homs on Sunday as Syria's regime pressed its assault on protest hubs, with another 65 people, including 53 civilians, killed in violence across the country, activists and monitors said.

There was "heavy shelling of Khaldiyeh, Hamidiyeh and Old Homs neighborhoods by the regime's army, and kabooms shook the whole city," the Local Coordination Committees said.

The LCC said security forces killed 16 civilians in Homs, 14 in Hama, five in rural Damascus
...Capital of the last overtly fascist regime in the world...
, 10 in Idlib, five in Daraa and three in Aleppo
...For centuries, Aleppo was Greater Syria's largest city and the Ottoman Empire's third, after Constantinople and Cairo. Although relatively close to Damascus in distance, Aleppans regard Damascenes as country cousins...
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britannia-based monitoring group, said in a statement that five non-combatants were killed by security force fire in the Homs area.

Four, including an infant, died in Homs itself, while a fifth -- a young girl -- was killed in Rastan by heavy machinegun fire. The Observatory also said a member of the security forces was killed in Homs city.

In the central Hama region to the north, the monitoring group said army shelling killed five civilians in the Murk and Latamna districts.

And in the southern town of Nawa, tanks entered the main streets, and heavy festivities broke out between regime forces and deserters, said the Observatory and the LCC, the main opposition activist group in Syria. Three soldiers and six rebel fighters were reportedly killed.

LCC activist Luai Rushod in Nawa spoke of "a large number of defections by soldiers in the southern part of Nawa, followed by festivities and troops committing barbaric murders."

Nawa is in the southern Daraa province, where the popular uprising against Hereditary President-for-Life Bashir Pencilneck al-Assad
Trampler of Homs...
's iron-fisted rule erupted in March 2011. Monitors say at least 9,100 people have been killed since then.

The Observatory said an kaboom hit a bridge in the Daraa region of Lajat, where many army deserters are thought to be.

In the north, near the border with Turkey, rockets were fired into the town of Aazaz as helicopters flew overhead, the LCC said in a statement sent to Agence La Belle France Presse in Beirut.

It added that rebel fighters of the Free Syrian Army blocked a highway used by the military for reinforcements and supplies to Aazaz, the scene of fierce festivities for the past few weeks.

Two deserters were killed in fighting in Aazaz with government forces using heavy machineguns and mortars, it said.

In the northwest province of Idlib, regime troops killed seven civilians, including three children, in the town of Saraqeb and in Kaframim village, where they torched the houses of dozens of fleeing rebels.

"Deserters have begun pulling out of Saraqeb," said the Observatory, which also reported fighting in the town of Ariha to the west.

Human Rights Watch
... dedicated to bitching about human rights violations around the world...
on Sunday accused regime forces of using civilians as human shields to march in front of them as they advanced on opposition-controlled towns in Idlib.

"By using civilians as human shields, the Syrian army is showing blatant disregard for their safety," HRW emergencies researcher Ole Solvang said in a statement, urging the army to immediately halt "this abhorrent practice."

In Damascus province, rebels fired rocket-propelled grenades in a dawn attack on a military facility in Nabak, the Observatory said.

Mohammed al-Shami, an activist, said fighting erupted at night between soldiers and army deserters and continued into the early hours, including in Douma, a hot spot on the capital's northeastern outskirts, where a young man was killed, according to the Observatory.

Elsewhere, the official SANA news agency said that an "armed terrorist group" attacked a gas pipeline in the eastern region of Bir al-Jouf.

At least 28 non-combatants were killed across Syria on Saturday, including two women and two children in the central province of Homs, the Observatory said.

Sixteen soldiers and two deserters were also reportedly killed.

As the year-old conflict showed no signs of abating, rebel fighters set up a military council to unify their ranks and political opposition leaders called a meeting of all dissident groups to forge common objectives.

The latest violence came as U.N.-Arab League
...an organization of Arabic-speaking states with 22 member countries and four observers. The League tries to achieve Arab consensus on issues, which usually leaves them doing nothing but a bit of grimacing and mustache cursing...
envoy Kofi Annan
...Ghanaian diplomat who served as the seventh and so far the worst Secretary-General of the UN. Annan and the UN were the co-recipients of the 2001 Nobel Peace Prize for something or other that probably sounded good at the time. In December 2004, reports surfaced that Kofi's son Kojo received payments from the Swiss company Cotecna, which had won a lucrative contract under the UN Oil-for-Food Program. Kofi Annan called for an investigation to look into the allegations, which stirred up the expected cesspool but couldn't seem to come up with enough evidence to indict Kofi himself, or even Kojo...
wrapped up and trip to Moscow to seek the vital backing of Russia, a key ally of the Syrian regime, for his plan to end the bloodshed.
Posted by:Fred

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