DAMASCUS - Fierce clashes approached the capital on Sunday as Syrian President Bashar al-AssadÂ’s opponents sought to crank up the pressure for UN action after the Arab League withdrew its observers.Regime forces fired heavy artillery and mortar rounds against the Damascus suburbs of Douma, Saaba, Irbin and Hamuriyeh and were locked in close battle with rebel fighters emboldened by a fresh wave of desertions, activists said.
“The more the regime uses the army, the more soldiers defect,” Ahmed al-Khatib, a local rebel council member on the Damascus outskirts, told AFP.
A spokesman for the rebel Free Syrian Army, which boasts 40,000 men and whose leadership is in Turkey, said that the fighting came a day after “a large wave of defections,” with 50 officers and soldiers turning their back on Assad.
In a “steady progression of fighting towards the capital,” spokesman Maher Nueimi said deserters were clashing with army regulars only eight kilometres (five miles) from Damascus. The regime, in turn, has launched “an unprecedented offensive in the past 24 hours, using heavy artillery” against villages in Damascus and Hama province of central Syria, Nueimi said.
Other rebel spokesmen reported heavy fighting in Rankus, 45 kilometres (28 miles) from Damascus, and of heightened tension in Hama, further to the north. Rankus was “besieged for the past five days and is being randomly shelled since dawn by tanks and artillery rounds,” rebel Abu Ali al-Rankusi told AFP by telephone.
In Hama, pro-regime snipers were deployed on the rooftops, according to activists, with security forces leaving “bodies of dead people with their hands tied behind their backs” on the streets across several neighbourhoods.
Earlier on Sunday activists and state media reported the deaths of 16 soldiers in two separate attacks as well as of five civilians and a deserter.
The latest toll adds to an AFP tally of at least 232 people — among them 147 civilians — killed since Tuesday, compiled from reports by the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights and state media.
The Observatory reported 10 members of the military killed when their convoy was attacked in Jebel al-Zuwiya in the northwest, and the official SANA news agency said “an armed terrorist group” killed six others near Damascus.
The watchdog also reported four civilians and a deserter killed as soldiers and mutineers clashed in the Ghuta area near the capital. It said another civilian was killed in Homs, central Syria.