DAMASCUS: Fighters stormed an army post in Douma killing six soldiers, while intense shelling by regime forces sent residents of the Damascus suburb fleeing in panic, a watchdog and activists said yesterday.
Other fighter-held bastions in and around Damascus were also bombarded at dawn.
The violence came hours after UN chief Ban Ki-moon urged Damascus to show compassion to its people.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said at least two civilians died when Douma, in the capital’s northeast, was rocked by shelling following the deadly raid by the fighters during the night on a medical center there that has now been taken over by the military.
“The army had transformed the center into a barracks and snipers were positioned there,” Observatory director Rami Abdel Rahman told AFP.
An amateur video posted by activists reported an exodus of residents of Douma and showed several vehicles with women inside driving off in the dark of night.
Assad’s troops also blasted a string of fighter strongholds in towns and suburbs outside the capital at dawn, including in Babila, Hosh Al-Arab, Saqba and Zabadani, the Britain-based Observatory said.
The Local Coordination Committees, an activist network, reported that more than 100 shells fell on Zabadani, once a resort destination known for its mild weather and scenic views just northwest of the capital but now devastated by the civil war ravaging Syria.
Elsewhere in Damascus province, the town of Yabroud came under fierce artillery fire, the LCC said.
Fighters on July 18 carried out a massive bombing on a security complex in Damascus, killing Assad’s brother-in-law, the defense minister and a general.
The Observatory said that Aleppo’s northeast district of Hanano City again came under bombardment yesterday, a day after 19 civilians were killed in shelling there and in other districts.
Fighting between troops and fighters also flared in the Arkoub, Sakhur, Sheikh Khodr and Sheikh Faris districts as well as along Suleiman Al-Halabi street in the city center, the watchdog said.
Fighters and loyalist troops on Monday clashed in the centuries-old UNESCO-listed Aleppo souk, days after it was ravaged by a fire sparked by earlier fighting.
On the political front, Ban said after a meeting with Syria’s Muallem at UN headquarters in New York that it was time for Damascus to lower the scale of its offensive against the insurgency.
“He stressed that it was the Syrian people who were being killed every day and appealed to the government of Syria to show compassion to its own people,” a spokesman for the UN secretary general said.
