Shelling targets Aleppo’s military sites and Damascus

Syrian regime troops countered an attack against a barrack in Aleppo launched by opposition fighters, at a time when shelling reached towns and neighborhoods in Damascus and other provinces, according to eye witnesses and the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.    

A witness told AFP that pro-regime troops were able to recover the barrack partially at 6 am on Saturday. 

The Observatory reported that five of the opposition fighters who attacked a regime checkpoint in Al-lermoun were killed.      

In Damascus, the Tadamon neighborhood in the capital’s south was shelled by pro-regime forces at dawn in an attempt to break into it. No casualties were reported by the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.   
 
Shelling targeted Deir al-Zour’s city of Boukmal, mainly near the Hamdan military airport, as well as towns and neighborhoods in Idlib and Deraa.    

On another note, a four-year-old Iraqi child was killed and 4 people were wounded as four mortar shells hit Iraqi border town of Al Kaem late on Friday night, according to Iraqi medical and security sources.    


Positions:      

Russia on Saturday soundly rejected U.S. calls for increased pressure on Syrian President Bashar Assad to relinquish power. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton tried to prod Moscow into supporting U.N. action to end the crisis in Syria and she expressed hope that Congress would repeal Cold War-era trade restrictions on Russia.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, after meeting Clinton on the sidelines of a meeting of Pacific Rim leaders, told reporters that Moscow is opposed to U.S.-backed penalties against the Assad government, in addition to new ones against Iran over its nuclear program, because they harm Russian commercial interests.

For her part, the Cypriot Foreign Minister Erato Kozakou-Marcoullis said that the European Union members reached a consensus to intensify sanctions against Syria.

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On another note, France has commenced humanitarian assistance to Syrian regions controlled by the armed opposition for whom it is providing various non military equipment.