Regime forces blitz key Syrian battlegrounds

NEAR ALEPPO, Syria: Syrian forces launched a wave of deadly air and ground attacks on northern Syria and Damascus yesterday, a day after US President Barack Obama warned the regime over its chemical weapons arsenal.
War planes bombarded the northern town of Marea and heavy shelling was reported in the nearby hub of Aleppo, including an area where a Japanese journalist was killed after being caught up in gunfire on Monday.
Activists also reported that troops had stormed a town near Damascus, torching homes and shops, while helicopters and war planes strafed several suburbs of the capital, which the regime claimed to have recaptured last month.
Japanese female reporter Mika Yamamoto, 45, died after coming under fire from apparently pro-government troops as she covered the anti-regime movement in the key northern hub of Aleppo on Monday, a colleague said.
Her death brings to four the number of foreign journalists killed in Syria since the uprising against the regime of President Bashar Assad in March 2011.
Obama put Assad’s regime on notice Monday that although he had not ordered military intervention “at this point,” the United States was “monitoring the situation very carefully,” and had drawn up contingency plans.
“There would be enormous consequences if we start seeing movement on the chemical weapons front or the use of chemical weapons... That would change my calculations significantly,” he told reporters.
Obama said the United States would regard any recourse by Damascus to its deadly arsenal as crossing a “red line.”
Syria’s admission in July that it has chemical weapons and could use them in case of any “external aggression” added a dangerous new dimension to a conflict that began as a peaceful uprising but has descended into a bitter armed revolt.
On Tuesday, Syrian forces shelled districts in Aleppo, killing nine civilians, among them two women and two children, and pounded the towns of Marea and Tall Rifaat to the north, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
“The army bombarded rebel weapons stocks in the Aleppo region to prevent the arms from reaching them (in the city),” a Syrian security official told AFP.
“Reinforcements from both sides are heading to Aleppo. It is a war that will last a long time.”
Aleppo, the main northern city which lies near the Turkish border, has become the main battleground of the conflict since fighting erupted there a month ago and the regime has warned of a “mother of all battles” to recapture it.
An AFP reporter in Marea reported that mourners joined a funeral procession for a 20-year-old man they said was killed when a fighter jet fired on his home that morning.
“To paradise we go, martyrs in our millions,” mourners chanted as they held the man’s body aloft on a makeshift carrier, wrapped in a blanket but with his waxen face uncovered.
The LCC also reported heavy artillery shelling from tanks southwest of Damascus and said warplanes and helicopters were strafing nearby suburbs. Troops also stormed a town near Damascus, torching homes and shops, the Observatory said.
Tuesday’s violence followed a bloody day in which 167 people were killed nationwide, the Observatory said.
Syria’s popular uprising has spiralled into an all-out armed conflict between rebel fighters and regime forces with more than 23,000 people killed, according to the Observatory. The United Nations puts the death toll at 17,000.
Yamamoto’s long-time collaborator Kazutaka Sato told Japanese broadcasters he and the veteran war reporter had been with anti-regime forces when they were shot at by what appeared to be a group of about 15 government troops. The TBS network cited Sato as saying she had been shot in the neck.
Yamamoto worked for the small but respected Japan Press news agency and had also covered the war in Afghanistan and the Iraq conflict.
The Observatory said three other journalists — a Lebanese woman, an Arab male and a Turkish national — were missing.
Lakhdar Brahimi, who has replaced former UN chief Kofi Annan as the international point man for Syria, warned on Sunday that it was now a matter of ending civil war rather than avoiding it.
But Syria — which insists it is fighting an insurgency by “armed terrorist groups” backed by the West, Gulf states and Turkey — reacted angrily saying that to speak of civil war “contradicts reality.”
The last members of the expired observer mission are expected to leave on Tuesday.
More than one million Syrians have been displaced within Syria and up to 2.5 million are in need of aid, according to the United Nations.