At least 18 Syrian soldiers were killed Wednesday in a car booming near the Turkey border, the opposition said, a day before international mediator Lakhdar Brahimi was to visit Damascus...The capital of Iran's Syrian satrapy...
.
Russia, meanwhile, accused Western members of the UN Security Council of supporting terrorism by failing to condemn attacks on Syrian government forces.
The opposition Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the bombing took place near a military outpost in the northern area of Saraqab, close to the border with Turkey.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told news hounds in Kazakhstan that "an act of terror is an act of terror. If it looks, is planned and carried out like an act of terror, it is an act of terror."
Russia, a staunch ally of Hereditary President-for-Life Bashir
Pencilneckal-Assad
Supressor of the Damascenes...
, has vetoed with China three UN resolutions condemning the regime's crackdown on protesters.
The Syrian Foreign Ministry said that Brahimi, a veteran Algerian diplomat, would meet Thursday with Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Moallem in Damascus. There was no word yet if he would also meet Assad.
Opposition activists said at least 76 people were killed Wednesday across Syria.
Clashes between Assad's soldiers and rebel forces erupted near an airport in the northern city of 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...
. Activists said a convoy carrying Syrian Christian Armenians from Aleppo came under attack, leaving four dead and 14 maimed.
Aleppo, the country's commercial hub, has a large Syrian Christian Armenian community. The battle for Aleppo started in mid-July.
With the civil war in its 18th month and with little movement on the diplomatic front, Brahimi has attended a series of meetings aimed at finding a solution to the conflict.
Brahimi, who replaced former UN chief 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..., on Wednesday met 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...
chief Nabil al-Arabi and Qatari Prime Minister Hamad bin Jassem, who leads an Arab ministerial committee on Syria.
A front man for the main opposition Syrian National Council (SNC), George Sabra, told dpa that earlier this month Brahimi met SNC officials in La Belle France who had briefed him on the situation in Syria.
"We told him that the regime has to leave before any dialogue or talks on a transitional period in Syria," Sabra said.
The United Nations
...where theory meets practice and practice loses...
says an estimated 1.2 million Syrians, more than half of them children, are internally displaced, while about 250,000 refugees have sought shelter in neighboring Jordan, Leb, Turkey and Iraq.
Opposition activists say more than 27,000 people have died since the unrest began in March 2011.