An explosion hit the Hai
al-Wuroud district in the northwest of Damascus on Tuesday, causing deaths and
injuries, Syrian state media said.
The opposition Syrian Observatory for Human
Rights, a group monitoring the violence, said at least 10 people were killed
and 40 wounded in the attack which employed three bombs.
Hai al-Wuroud, a hilltop neighborhood
inhabited mostly by members of President Bashar al-Assad's minority Alawite
sect, is situated near barracks and housing for elite army units.
The UN-Arab League mediator in
the Syria conflict, Lakhdar Brahimi, has urged Russia to be "more
pro-active" in resolving a 19-month-old conflict that has killed more than
32,000 people, diplomats said on Tuesday, citing a senior UN official.
UN political affairs chief Jeffrey Feltman
made the remarks at a closed-door session of the 15-nation Security Council on
Syria, diplomats inside the council chamber told Reuters on condition of
anonymity.
Feltman also told the council that he had
received credible reports of the use of cluster bombs by Syrian government
forces, the envoys said.
The head of Syria's main opposition group warned Tuesday that forces that he says are trying to undermine his Syrian National Council are inadvertently prolonging the rule of President Bashar Assad.
Abdelbaset Sieda spoke at an SNC convention in Doha as the group tried to push back against US criticism and efforts to form a new opposition leadership that would likely sideline the SNC.
The group, which was formed a year ago, has been slow to include activists and fighters from Syria who are risking their lives to topple the regime. Made up mostly of exiles and academics, the SNC has appeared increasingly irrelevant and out of touch as the conflict in Syria has escalated and the focus has shifted to the battlefield, where control of Syria is almost certain to be decided.
Earlier, British Prime Minister David Cameron suggested that Syria's president Bashar Assad could be allowed safe passage out of the country if that option would guarantee an end to the nation's civil war.
In an interview with Al Arabiya television, Cameron said the international community should consider anything "to get that man out of the country and to have a safe transition in Syria."
"I am certainly not offering him an exit plan to Britain, but if he wants to leave, he could leave, that could be arranged," Cameron said, speaking in Abu Dhabi on the second day of a three-day tour of the Gulf and Middle East.
In London, diplomats said that Cameron was not suggesting Assad could escape potential international prosecution if he were to be granted passage out of Syria.
Cameron has previously called the failure of world powers to halt the Assad's regime assault on its opponents a "terrible stain" on the reputation of the deadlocked United Nations, where Syria's allies Russia and China have repeatedly blocked attempts to approve harsher sanctions in the Security Council.
This as gunmen shot and killed the brother of Syria's parliament speaker as he
drove to work in the capital Damascus on Tuesday, the state-run news
agency reported on Tuesday.
It was the latest in a wave of
assassinations targeting Syrian officials, army officers and other
prominent supporters of President Bashar Assad's regime. Four of the
president's top security aides were killed in a rebel bombing of state
security headquarters in Damascus on July 18, including the defense
minister and Assad's brother-in-law.
The SANA news agency
said Mohammed Osama Laham, brother of Parliament Speaker Jihad Laham,
was killed in the Damascus neighborhood of Midan.
The
killing came a day after some of the most intense fighting in Damascus
in months. On Tuesday, activists and state media reported clashes,
shelling and air raids in different parts of Syria.
The Syrian Observatory for Human rights also reported that a
booby trapped car exploded overnight Monday near Damascus leaving several
injured, as Syrian regime war jets pound the Douma suburbs.
Meanwhile, an
explosion hit the main oil pipeline feeding a refinery on the western edge of
the Syrian city of Homs on Tuesday during fighting between rebels and army
forces in the area, opposition activists said.
Video footage, which could not be
independently verified, showed thick smoke rising from the pipeline which links
eastern oil fields with the Homs refinery, one of two in the country.
The Britain-based Observatory said air raids on Houla, a group of villages in central province of Homs, killed seven people. The group also reported air raids on the Damascus suburbs of Douma and Maadamiyeh saying there are casualties without giving numbers.
A spokesman for Hamas says the Syrian government has sealed its offices in Damascus, finalizing the break between the Islamic militant group and its former patron.
Spokesman Ayman Taha said on Tuesday that the move had been expected after Hamas openly switched sides to support the armed rebellion against the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
Taha says Monday's move by Damascus was "a result of our siding with the Syrian people in their just struggle." Taha spoke from Cairo.
For his part, Iraqi
Kurdish President Masoud Barzani warned Kurds in Syria against being sucked
into the "fires of discord," urging them to preserve Kurdish unity as
tensions between rival factions threaten to spillover into violence.
Syria's Kurds see the war ravaging their
country as an unprecedented opportunity to gain the kind of freedoms enjoyed by
their ethnic kin in neighboring Iraq, where they live autonomously from the
federal capital in Baghdad.
Rivalry between two main camps,
the Kurdish National Council (KNC) and another group, the Democratic Union
Party (PYD) risks devolving into Kurd-on-Kurd conflict and further complicating
the civil war in Syria.
REUTERS/AP