Assad troops kill 62 fighters in ambush

BEIRUT: Syrian government forces killed more than 60 fighters on Wednesday in an ambush near Damascus, a blow to opposition fighters confronting a regime offensive in the capital, activists said.
The state news agency SANA confirmed the ambush near the Damascus suburb of Adra at dawn, saying “dozens” were killed. The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said at least 62 fighters died. It did not report any government casualties.
SANA said the fighters were members of the Al-Qaeda-linked Jabhat Al-Nusra or Nusra Front. It added that they included foreign fighters.
Syrian troops have been on the offensive in the past few months in an attempt to clear out Damascus suburbs used by opposition fighters to threaten President Bashar Assad’s seat of power.
State-run television broadcaster Al-Ikhbariya aired footage of bloodied corpses, some in camouflage. It said they were killed in an ambush as they were on their way to attack an army post near Damascus.
The bodies were gathered in what appeared to be a desert area.
Mohammed Saeed, an activist who is based near Damascus, told The Associated Press that 65 fighters were on their way from the eastern suburbs of the capital to the nearby area of Qalamoun. He added that the fighters were walking the 30-km route because it is dangerous to drive in the area as it is watched by regime forces.
“The regime forces riddled them with heavy machine gun fire,” Saeed said via Skype. He added that 62 were killed and three escaped and reached Qalamoun. “It seems that the regime discovered the secret road that the fighters were using,” Saeed said.
Meanwhile, satellite images have laid bare the suffering inflicted on Syria’s largest city, a London-based rights group said Wednesday, cataloguing hundreds of damaged or destroyed houses and more than a thousand roadblocks.
Amnesty International said it had worked with the American Association for the Advancement of Science to analyze pictures of Aleppo taken by aerospace imagery providers DigitalGlobe and Astrium for signs of destruction in the metropolis, which has been the scene of months of vicious fighting between regime forces and the fighters. “The images are a snapshot of a population under brutal siege,” Amnesty’s Christoph Koettl said in a statement.
Many of the photographs released by Amnesty show a general view of the city, with red dots meant to indicate damage and destruction. The rights group said the damage was “emblematic of the relentless bombardment” and said analysis of the satellite imagery showed the destruction was “severely lopsided,” with opposition-controlled neighborhoods overwhelmingly hit. Several close-up images showed what the rights group said was the damage caused by the Assad government’s ballistic missile attacks on civilian areas.