Christian town new flash point in Syria

BEIRUT: Syrian government forces battled Tuesday with Al-Qaeda-linked rebels trying to capture an ancient Christian town north of Damascus, activists and the state media said.
The Jabhat Al-Nusra, or Nusra Front, appear to have targeted Sadad because of its strategic location near the main highway north of Damascus, rather than because it is Christian.
The assault on Sadad, some 95 km north of Damascus, began at dawn Monday, said the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. Local police fought back the initial assault and were reinforced by the army.
The rebel attack seemed to target a chief hospital in the town, said the Observatory, which monitors fighting through a network of activists on the ground. He said that there was also fighting in the nearby town of Muhin and that the Nusra Front controlled the main road leading to Damascus.
Also Tuesday, mortar rounds slammed into a pro-government suburb on the outskirts of Damascus, killing at least two people, said the state SANA news agency and Abdurrahman.
It wasn’t immediately clear who was behind the shelling but rebels have previously targeted Jaramana, home to Christians and the Druz religious group. It is close to another suburb, Mleiha, where fighting between rebels and government forces has been raging for days.
Meanwhile, international inspectors tasked by the UN to destroy Syria’s chemical weapons capability said they had visited 17 sites since they began their work at the beginning of October. In a statement issued late Monday, they said they had destroyed “critical equipment to make the facilities inoperable.”