Airstrikes batter fighters

BEIRUT: The Syrian Army attacked two opposition-held suburbs of Damascus with fierce air strikes and shelling yesterday, pursuing an offensive against President Bashar Assad’s foes, residents and a monitoring group said.
Assad’s forces, which have been trying to dislodge fighters from several outlying districts south and east of the capital, focused their assault on Jobar, just inside central Damascus.
The army seized the town of Otaiba on Wednesday, cutting a weapons supply route from the Jordanian border into the eastern fringes of Damascus that fighters had used for eight months.
One resident reported intense bombardment of several fighter-held districts that began at 7 a.m. (0400 GMT) yesterday.
“It was not the usual regime shelling, it sounded like rockets,” said the resident who asked not to be named.
Another resident said 18 tanks had gathered in the capital’s Abbasid Square, which has come to mark off army-held lines from the nearby opposition-controlled eastern areas of Jobar and Qaboun.
Rami Abdelrahman, head of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, said heavy air strikes had hit both districts.
“There has also been heavy fighting there since early this morning. There is normally fighting in Jobar, but today it is very intense,” said Abdelrahman, whose British-based monitoring group relies on a network of contacts in Syria.
“The regime is trying to regain control,” he added.
Meanwhile, the European Union yesterday reiterated a request to Damascus to enable a UN chemical weapons probe in Syria after the US said for the first time that the regime has probably used such weapons.
"We hope there will be a United Nations investigation inside Syria to hopefully shed some light on what has really happened," a spokesman for the EU's top diplomat Catherine Ashton said after being queried over the EU stand.
"The bottom line is this would of course be clearly unacceptable" if proven, said spokesman Michael Mann. Asked if Brussels remained unconvinced over the allegations of chemical weapons use, he added: "We are still wanting more monitoring to be done ... We don't want to be definitive on this until we have some definitive evidence."
"The most important thing is for the United Nations to carry out an investigation inside the country."