Assad regime out to destroy Syria

DAMASCUS: The chief of the Red Cross was yesterday headed to Syria on a humanitarian mission, his office said, as an air strike on a northern rebel bastion killed 18 people and a car bomb rocked a Damascus suburb.
Also lining up for a visit to the violence-wracked country was new UN-Arab League peace envoy to Syria, Lakhdar Brahimi, who has openly admitted that his mission is “nearly impossible.”
The high-profile visits come as violence escalates in Syrian flash points and the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported more than 5,000 people, mainly civilians, killed in August alone.
Peter Maurer, the new head of the International Committee of the Red Cross, was traveling to Damascus yesterday for a three-day visit and would meet President Bashar Assad the following day, his office said.
The visit is Maurer’s first to Syria since he took up his duties as president on July 1, the ICRC said in a statement.
During his visit, Maurer would meet Assad, as well as Foreign Minister Walid Muallem and several other ministers “to discuss pressing humanitarian issues,” it added.
“At a time when more and more civilians are being exposed to extreme violence, it is of the utmost importance that we and the Syrian Arab Red Crescent succeed in significantly scaling up our humanitarian response,” Maurer said in the statement.
Brahimi gave a deeply pessimistic view of the task ahead of him, in an interview with the BBC. “I know how difficult it is — how nearly impossible. I can’t say impossible — (it is) nearly impossible,” he said. He said he was “scared of the weight of responsibility. People are already saying people are dying and what are you doing?”
“The success of Lakhdar Brahimi does not depend on Syria,” Zoabi said.
On the war front, an airstrike by a Syrian fighter jet on a building in the northern rebel-held town of Al-Bab in Aleppo province killed at least 10 men, six women and two children, the Britain-based Observatory said.
The army also pounded several districts of the nearby city of Aleppo, the Observatory said, more than six weeks after the start of what Assad’s regime warned would be “the mother of all battles” in Syria’s commercial hub. The watchdog, which has a network of activists on the ground, also reported that a car bomb ripped through the mainly Christian and Druze suburb of Jaramana yesterday that killed five persons.
A Syrian warplane bombed a building in the northern rebel-held town of Al-Bab in Aleppo province yesterday, killing at least 10 men, six women and two children, a watchdog said.
“The victims included two children, a girl and a boy,” Rami Abdel Rahman, director of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, said. “They died when the fighter jet bombed the building where they were sheltered.”
Assad’s army bulldozers razed houses in western Damascus yesterday, pursuing what activists called collective punishment of Sunni areas hostile to President Bashar Assad.
Bulldozers backed by combat troops demolished buildings in the poor Tawahin district, near the Damascus-Beirut highway, activists and residents said. “They started three hours ago. The bulldozers are bringing down shops and houses. The inhabitants are in the streets,” said a woman who lives in a high-rise building overlooking the area.
Troops forced residents to erase anti-Assad graffiti and write slogans glorifying the president instead, activists said. “This is an unprovoked act of collective punishment. The rebels had left, there are no longer even demonstrations in the area,” said Mouaz Al-Shami, a campaigner collecting video documentation of the demolitions.
More than 5,200 Filipinos are waiting to flee the fighting in Syria but bureaucratic requirements are delaying their return, a foreign department official said yesterday.
Foreign Affairs Undersecretary Rafael Seguis said a total of 5,228 Filipinos have signed up at the Philippine Embassy in Damascus for repatriation, the largest number recorded since the outbreak of fighting. Seguis, who is acting as a special envoy to help speed the repatriation of the Filipinos, said foreign workers leaving Syria are still required to complete documentary requirements and obtain an exit visa before they can go.
Some 1,493 Filipinos are currently having their papers processed and could return home “in a few weeks,” he said. The rest are still hoping the fighting will die down but Seguis warned this was unlikely.
“It’s going to be a long, drawn-out internal conflict among the Syrian people,” he told reporters.
He called on the more than 7,000 Filipinos still in Syria to evacuate while air and land routes out of that country are still open. Seguis added that many of the Filipinos are based in the critical areas of Damascus, Homs, Daraa, Aleppo, and Idlib.
The Philippine government has already repatriated more than 2,100 Filipino workers from Syria since it ordered a mandatory evacuation of its nationals there in December.