Forty Syrian soldiers and pro-regime militiamen were killed in fighting with rebels who captured an army camp near the town of Nayrab in the northwestern province of Idlib on Wednesday, a watchdog reported.

Rebels took control of the army camp, which was “one of the most important bastions of the regime in the Idlib region,” and several army checkpoints in the area, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

“The fighting has killed 14 from the rebel side and not less than 40 among the soldiers of the regular army and members of the Popular Committees [pro-regime militia],” said the Observatory which relies on a network of medics and activists on the ground.

The army used the camp to “bombard many localities in the region of Idlib, leaving hundreds dead and thousands wounded,” it said, adding that the facility also served as a detention center where “dozens of detainees have died under torture”.

AFP - 05/22/2013 

05/11/2013 - #Syria - 13 dead in #Turkey car bombings near Syria border Reyhanli

02/19/2013 - #Syria - Damascus -  A car bomb has torn through the Jdaydet Artouz suburb of western Damascus. According to the CFDPC, a network of activists working to report on the news in Damascus, earlier reported that at least 3 people have been killed, but that number has risen to 5. 

#Syria February 13/2013 Jobar: Smoke rise after airstrikes by regime, civilian casualties resulted.

#Syria Nov 29/12 Warning distressing: Heartbreaking footage of the aftermath of an airstrike on Ansari, Aleppo

30 Oct 2012 #Syria #Douma Warning distressing: Residents search through rubble after airstrikes this morning

04/09/12
By Dominique Soguel

Beres is currently working in Aleppo.

ALEPPO, Syria: Veteran war surgeon Jacques Beres has his own compelling reasons for urging that a no-fly zone be imposed over Syria – one bomb dropped by the regime leaves more wounded than doctors can fix in a day.

Working under cover in the northern city of Aleppo, which has been pounded for weeks as President Bashar Assad’s forces seek to overrun rebel bastions, Beres insists the death toll in the Syrian conflict is higher than what is reported.

“At least 50,000 people have been killed without counting the disappeared,” Beres, a French surgeon who daily patches up dozens of people in a hospital near the front lines of Aleppo, told AFP in an interview.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which has a network of activists on the ground across Syria, has given a latest toll of at least 26,283 people killed in Syria since the revolt began in March last year – 18,695 civilians, 1,079 defectors and 6,509 troops.

But Beres said watchdogs such as the Britain-based Observatory are unable to paint a full picture of the losses because many deaths are documented “only with ink and paper.”

“I am sure that the dead that I have here are not tallied in London,” he said.

In the past two weeks, he said, he has treated a daily average of 20 to 45 wounded people, the majority of them fighters with the opposition Free Syria Army, including “quite a few jihadists.”

Fatalities in rebel ranks range between two and six each day, he said.

But those are just the figures collected in one small hospital within a massive commercial city which is now almost evenly divided between rebel and army-controlled areas.

Many gray zones lie between both camps and the security situation remains fluid: Shops are open and pedestrian traffic has resumed in some neighborhoods while tank shells and mortar hit others.

“It is shameful that a no-fly zone hasn’t been set up,” said the co-founder of Doctors Without Borders, setting aside a cup of tea to review X-rays and offer a Syrian colleague advice on how best to dislodge a bullet from a man’s leg.

“It is an incredible massacre. Even if now it is a civil war, it is a very asymmetric conflict: light weapons against tanks and aerial bombardment,” said Beres, whose experience on the field covers almost every major war from Vietnam in the 1960s to Libya last year.

“All this because they asked for a little bit of freedom and said that they had enough of Bashar.”

This is the third humanitarian mission that Beres has undertaken to Syria this year, backed variously by organizations such as France Syrie Democracie, UAM93, Doctors Without Borders, and AAVS (Association d’aide aux victimes en Syrie).

He was in the central city of Homs in February when the neighborhood of Baba Amr was decimated by Assad’s forces. In May he roamed around Idlib province where he says pro-regime soldiers destroyed pharmacies and burned a clinic down to the ground.

Beres, in his 70s, has been smuggling himself into the country at great risk, armed only with the firm belief that he has a “humanitarian duty to heal.

09/08/2012

(ICRC)

Thousands of civilians, especially in the governorates of Damascus and Aleppo, are struggling to stay safe. Despite facing increasing challenges over the past three weeks, the ICRC and the Syrian Arab Red Crescent assisted over 125,000 people affected by violence in several parts of Syria.

“Though the ICRC and the Syrian Arab Red Crescent are doing everything possible to assist civilians affected by the violence, it is also up to the parties to the conflict to take every feasible measure to spare the civilian population the effects of the fighting,” said Marianne Gasser, the head of the ICRC delegation in Syria.

“As the situation began to worsen in Damascus, it became very difficult for our staff to move about in and around the city to bring aid to the civilian population,” said Ms Gasser. “Needs have been growing very fast, so the ICRC has had to quickly adapt its way of working to be able to meet them in partnership with the Syrian Arab Red Crescent.”

As fighting flared up in the governorate of Aleppo, in the north of Syria, thousands of people left their homes and began pouring into public buildings, now used as temporary shelters. Over 80 schools in several parts of the governorate are currently hosting civilians who have fled the fighting. “Aleppo is of particular concern to the ICRC, not only because of its distant geographical location, but because the Syrian Arab Red Crescent had to suspend most of its activities owing to extreme danger on the ground,” said Ms Gasser. “Still, dozens of volunteers have continued to work under extremely difficult conditions to meet the growing needs of the civilian population.”

To help the Red Crescent cope with the mounting need for humanitarian aid, the ICRC managed to deliver enough food and other essentials to Aleppo governorate today to cover the needs of at least 12,500 people.

Many health-care facilities are also finding it ever more challenging to treat the injured because their services have been disrupted by the violence, and medical items are scarce. The ICRC has sent enough medical supplies to treat between 250 and 1,000 casualties, depending on the seriousness of their injuries. Over the past two weeks, the ICRC arranged repeatedly for water and sanitation technicians to ensure that schools had enough clean water to cover the needs of the displaced people taking shelter in them and to preserve sanitary conditions despite frequent overcrowding.

Though humanitarian efforts over the past few weeks have focused on Damascus and Aleppo, needs in other parts of the country remain high. In Homs city, thousands of people have taken shelter in schoolhouses and other public buildings, some for several weeks already. The ICRC has delivered a one-month supply of food for over 20,000 people in the city. For several months, access to water has also been a serious concern for the majority of the people in Homs. To help the city cope with water shortages, the ICRC has installed a 1,000 kilowatt-amp generator to boost the capacity of the Ain Al-Tanour pumping stations, which supply 80 per cent of the drinking water for the city’s combined resident and displaced population of 800,000. To help the Syrian Arab Red Crescent deal with the persisting humanitarian needs in Hama, Idlib, Lattakia, Raqqa and Hassakeh governorates, the ICRC has delivered a one-month supply of food for more than 43,000 civilians.

The ICRC currently has 50 staff members working in Syria. Together with the Syrian Arab Red Crescent, ICRC staff have been assisting tens of thousands of people in all parts of the country who have so far been affected by the violence.

Over the past three weeks, in cooperation with the Syrian Arab Red Crescent, the ICRC has:

• delivered enough supplies to treat between 250 and 1,000 casualties to Aleppo, and wound-dressing and other materials to the Syrian Arab Red Crescent in Damascus;

• equipped the Red Crescent’s four mobile health units, which have been providing primary health care and medicines in schools hosting displaced people in Damascus;

• provided more than 125,000 mainly displaced people in and around Damascus city and in Aleppo, Homs, Hama, Idlib, Lattakia, Hassakeh and Raqqa with over 25,000 food parcels, together with one-kilogram packs of dates and dried apricot to mark the holy month of Ramadan, to help them cope for one month;

• helped the Red Crescent’s Aleppo branch improve access to safe drinking water in 10 schools hosting an estimated 2,000 people, and also helped improve access to safe drinking water and improve sanitary conditions in Damascus and Rural Damascus for over 68,000 people who recently fled the fighting and are staying in 27 schools and residential areas;

• continued to ensure that more than 300,000 people accommodated in over 100 schoolhouses in Homs have an ample supply of clean water;

• delivered nearly 10,000 mattresses to schoolhouses and other public buildings hosting displaced people in and around Damascus city and in Aleppo and Homs, and 2,000 sets of hygiene items to Aleppo.

For further information, please contact:

Rabab Al-Rifaï, ICRC Damascus, tel: +963 993 700 847 or +963 11 331 0476
Cecilia Goin, ICRC Beirut, tel: +961 353 1694
Hicham Hassan, ICRC Geneva: tel: +41 22 730 25 41 or +41 79 536 92 57

01/08/12

30/07/12

#Syria, Fierce fighting has erupted in rebel-held districts of Aleppo for the second straight day as opposition forces continue to hold out in Syria’s largest city. At least 200,000 residents of the country’s commercial capital have fled in the past two days, according to the United Nations. Several neighbourhoods in Aleppo where rebels are active have come under heavy government shelling, leading to casualties among both fighters and civilians. Al Jazeera’s Jamal El Shayyal reports.

By Jill Dougherty, reporting from Aspen, CO

Top national security officials – from the Obama administration, from governments around the world, from think tanks – are arriving at Aspen for the Aspen Security Forum. It’s a gold mine of the latest inside thinking on national security threats and how to deal with them.

Standing at the CNN live shot location I flag down Jane Harman, formerly the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, now Director, President and CEO of the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, DC.

On Syria she’s waving a “red flag” on any idea of arming the opposition so I ask her how the administration should proceed?

“Cautiously,” she says. “I take seriously the fact that there are a huge number of casualties in the country now, but we have just had it reconfirmed that al Qaeda is increasing numbers in the opposition and just saying ‘Let’s arm the opposition, lets start an air or land war in Syria, I don’t think that necessarily leads to a better result.”

“I think our policy of demanding that Bashar al Assad go is correct,” Harman adds, “but we need to keep this an international focus and to work with others in the world to help structure some opposition government that would come after him.”

Harman still sees Russia as critical to a solution.

“I’m still hopeful that Russia will step up and do the right thing instead of the wrong thing and help us achieve what I call a Yemen-type solution where the leader, Bashar al Assad, and his family are given sanctuary some place and a structured government comes after them,” she tells me.

Syrian army helicopters and tanks pounded rebel positions in the 
Mediterranean province of Latakia for a second day on Wednesday, 
activists said, in the heaviest clashes there since the revolt against 
President Bashar al-Assad erupted last year.

BEIRUT (AP) — Syrian activists say regime forces fired on a funeral procession in the presence of U.N. observers, causing many casualties.

The activists said the observers were not among the wounded Tuesday, but their vehicles were damaged.

A U.N. spokesman confirmed the observers were caught up in the country’s violence on Tuesday and their cars sustained damage. But Ahmad Fawzi, a spokesman for special envoy Kofi Annan, had no other details.

An Idlib-based activist, Fadi al-Yassin, said he witnessed the attack on the funeral and saw that the observers were there.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, citing a network of sources on the ground, also reported the attack.

THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP’s earlier story is below.

ROME (AP) - Syria’s opposition umbrella group, the Syrian National Council, has re-elected its president Burhan Ghalioun to another three-month term.

Bassam Imadi, the council’s representative in Rome, said the vote was taken during a conference of council members here Tuesday.

Ghalioun has said the election showed that the council worked by consensus and is there to “serve the revolution.” He called for decisive action to enforce U.N.-Arab League envoy Kofi Annan’s peace plan, warning it risked failure.

World powers have backed the Annan plan, but the bloodshed has not stopped.

More than 200 U.N. observers have been deployed in Syria to oversee the truce between the government and armed rebels. The U.N. estimates the conflict has killed more than 9,000 people.

05/15/12 #Syria Khan Sheikhoun, Idlib shelled as monitors visit, UN vehicle hit, casualties reported

More footage of the funeral that was attacked by assad terrorists in Aleppo earlier today youtube.com/watch?feature=… #Syria #FailedSyriaPlan

— farooos (@farGar) April 14, 2012