BEIRUT, (Reuters) – Syrian fighter jets bombed the Palestinian Yarmouk camp in Damascus yesterday, killing at least 25 people sheltering in a mosque in an area where Syrian rebels have been trying to advance into the capital, opposition activists said.
The attack was part of a month-old campaign by President Bashar al-Assad’s forces to eject rebels fighting to overthrow him from positions hemming in Damascus. Yarmouk, on the southern fringes of the Syrian capital, falls within a swathe of territory running from the east to southwest of the city from where rebels hope to storm into the main redoubt of Assad.
In Paris, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said he believed the Syrian ruler would fall soon. “I think the end is nearing for Bashar al-Assad,” Fabius told RFI radio.
He described the attack on Yarmouk as scandalous. “You have to ask yourself whether President Assad is not trying to enflame the region (through it),” the minister said.
Taking an opposing line to that adopted by France, Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah said the rebels could not win in Syria.
“The situation in Syria is getting more complicated (but) anyone who thinks the armed opposition can settle the situation on the ground is very very very mistaken.”
Syrian rebels accuse Hezbollah, a Shi’ite Muslim group based in Lebanon, of sending fighters to neighbouring Syria to help Assad overcome the largely Sunni Muslim revolt. Hezbollah denies these accusations.
In the latest of a string of military installations to fall to the rebels, the army’s infantry college in northern Aleppo was captured on Saturday after five days of fighting, a rebel commander with the powerful Islamist Tawheed Brigade said.
Opposition activists said the deaths in Yarmouk, to which refugees have fled from other fighting in nearby suburbs, resulted from a rocket fired by a warplane hitting the mosque.
A video posted on YouTube showed bodies and body parts scattered on the stairs of what appeared to be the mosque.
The latest battlefield accounts could not be independently verified due to tight restrictions on media access to Syria.
It was the first reported aerial attack on Yarmouk since a popular uprising against Assad erupted 21 months ago and evolved, after he tried to smash it with military force, from peaceful street protests into an armed insurgency.
Syria is home to more that 500,000 Palestinian refugees, most living in Yarmouk, and both Assad’s government and the rebels have enlisted and armed Palestinians as the uprising has mushroomed into a civil war.
Heavy fighting broke out 12 days ago between Palestinians loyal to Assad and Syrian rebels, together with a brigade of Palestinian fighters known as Liwaa al-Asifah (Storm Brigade).
Clashes flared anew after Sunday’s air strike between Palestinians from the pro-Assad Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC) and Syrian rebels together with other Palestinian fighters, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group.
