The Syrian Observatory For Human Rights later reported Syrian rebels
downing a regime war jet in Damascus Reef.
This as, Syrian activists earlier said on Friday
that government warplanes have been bombing the central city of Homs, one of
the flashpoints of the 18-month-old uprising against President Bashar Assad.
The Observatory described the attack as the worst the city has
seen in five months. The focus of fighting has shifted to other areas,
including Syria's commercial hub of Aleppo, since a government offensive
against rebel strongholds in Homs ended in April.
The Observatory said tanks and mortars as well as
aircraft had bombarded the city's Khaldiya neighborhood.
Syrian rebels said they captured
an air defense base with a cache of missiles outside Damascus, a rare advance
in a city where President Bashar Assad's forces have them on the back foot.
A video posted on YouTube shows dozens of rebels dressed in army
fatigues celebrating as black smoke rises from a military installation behind
them.
Cautious calm prevailed over the Syrian-Turkish
border on Friday as Turkish forces were deployed at the border, a day after
parliament approved a bill authorizing military operations beyond the Turkish
border.
On the other hand, several
protests were staged in a number of Syrian cities raising the slogan “we want
arms, not statements”, amid the ongoing clashes in Aleppo, Rif Damascus and
other towns, where the rebels reported raids attempts.
International positions:
The UN Security Council
overcame deep divisions to unanimously approve a statement condemning Syria's
shelling of a Turkish town that killed five women and children "in the
strongest terms."
The Council unanimously condemned as well what it described as "terrorist attacks" in the Syrian city of Aleppo earlier this week, a series of coordinated suicide bombings which killed 48 people in the northern metropolis.
"The members of the Security Council condemned in the strongest terms the terrorist attacks in Aleppo, Syria on 3 October, causing dozens of deaths and over one hundred civilians injured, responsibility for which was claimed by the Jebhat al-Nusra group affiliated with al Qaeda," the 15-nation council said in a non-binding statement.
For his part, Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan said on Friday that testing Turkey's capacity for deterrence would be "a fatal mistake", in a warning to Damascus in the wake of Syrian shelling of a Turkish town that killed five people.
Striking a belligerent tone in a speech to a crowd in Istanbul, Erdogan said: "We are not interested in war, but we're not far from it either. This nation has come to where it is today having gone through intercontinental wars."
The Turkish military returned fire after a mortar bomb fired from Syria landed in countryside in southern Turkey, the state-run Anatolian news agency reported the governor of Hatay province as saying on Friday.
Turkish artillery bombarded Syrian military targets on Wednesday and Thursday in response to shelling by Syrian forces that killed five Turkish civilians further east along the border.
AP/REUTERS
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