AMMAN: Syrian troops backed by tanks and artillery moved into a fighter-held district of Damascus on Monday, a fighter said.
Opposition sources said troops loyal to Bashar Assad advanced into the neighborhood of Qaboun after subjecting the Sunni Muslim district to heavy shelling. Two adjacent fighter-held neighborhoods have been under sustained fire in recent weeks.
Backed by guerrillas from the Lebanese Shiite group Hezbollah, Assad has recaptured important regions in central Syria in the past two months, linking Damascus to his Alawite heartland on the coast. His troops now appear focused on eliminating the militant threat to the capital.
In Qaboun, Republican Guards troops detained hundreds of people in public places to prevent fighters from hitting government troops as they entered the district, activists said.
Qaboun contains an industrial area through which fighters had been linking up with opposition units in the north-eastern suburb of Harasta.
Republican Guards units overran the industrial area and besieged Qaboun with T-72 tanks while units on high ground in the center of the capital hit Qaboun with rockets and artillery, according to a fighter there.
“They made inroads into Qaboun. We are still on the high buildings but they took lots of civilians to prevent us from hitting them,” said Mohammad Abu Al-Hoda of the Free Syrian Army.
He said the hostages were being held in a mosque and two schools.
The Qaboun Coordination Committee, an activist group, said at least 60 people had been killed in Qaboun over the last few days by the shelling and subsequent clashes.
A working class district, Qaboun was one of the first areas of Damascus to demonstrate against four decades of rule by Assad and his late father before becoming a center of armed resistance after security forces killed dozens of Sunni Muslim protesters.
The conflict has taken on a sectarian dimension seen elsewhere in Syria. The opposition Syrian National Coalition said in a statement that 200 people were trapped in a mosque in Qaboun and 40,000 civilians in Qaboun and nearby Barzeh have been under siege for the last seven months and face the threat of being wiped out by indiscriminate shelling.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a pro-opposition monitoring group, said that the detained residents were able to flee the mosque on Saturday. But it said locals were struggling to cope with shortages of food and medicine and the presence of snipers.
Heavy fighting in Damascus’ Qaboun neighborhood
