REPORT: Syrian troops retake Christian town from jihadis

Former Australian FM wants Syria veterans banned                 

Australia's former foreign minister has urged the government to consider barring Australians who fight in Syria from returning home.                 

Bob Carr was foreign minister until the former Labor Party government lost power in an election last month. He told Australian Broadcasting Corp. on Monday that as minister, he had been advised by his department that preventing Australians from returning from the Syrian civil war would be illegal because it would leave them stateless.               

Carr urged the new government to seek a legal option to achieve that aim.             

Security officials fear Australians are being radicalized through fighting in Syria and will heighten the terrorism threat at home.            

Attorney General George Brandis said in a statement his government "is seriously concerned that Australians are fighting in Syria."


On the field:

Syria's state media say government forces have retaken a Christian town north of Damascus after a week of clashes with al-Qaeda-linked fighters who had recently captured key parts of it.

The state-run SANA news agency says the army "restored security and stability" to the town of Sadad early on Monday.
   
The town had been in opposition hands since last week, when al-Qaeda-linked groups captured a checkpoint that gave them control of the western part of the town.
     
The fighting came as the U.N.-Arab League envoy headed to Syria for his first trip to the country in almost a year. Lakhdar Brahimi had arrived in Beirut earlier on Monday and left for Damascus.
  
Brahimi is trying to prepare a peace conference on Syria supposed to take place in Geneva next month.
          
On Sunday, Syria filed details of its poison gas and nerve agent program and an initial plan to destroy it to the world's chemical weapons watchdog, the organization said.
     
The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons said in a statement that Syria completed its declaration as part of a strict and ambitious timeline that aims to eliminate the lethal stockpile by mid-2014.
     
The group, based in The Hague, said Syria made the declaration Thursday. The announcement provides "the basis on which plans are devised for a systematic, total and verified destruction of declared chemical weapons and production facilities," the group said.
     
Such declarations made to the organization are confidential. No details of Syria's program were released.
     
Syria already had given preliminary details to the OPCW when it declared it was joining the organization in September. The move warded off possible U.S. military strikes in the aftermath of an Aug. 21 chemical weapon attack on a Damascus suburb. Syria denies responsibility for the deadly attack.
     
OPCW inspectors were hastily dispatched to Syria this month and have visited most of the 23 sites Damascus declared. They also have begun overseeing destruction work to ensure that machines used to mix chemicals and fill munitions with poisons are no longer functioning.
    
Syria is believed to possess around 1,000 metric tons of chemical weapons, including mustard gas and sarin.
     
It has not yet been decided how or where destruction of Syria's chemical weapons will happen. Damascus' declaration includes a general plan for destruction that will be considered by the OPCW's 41-nation executive council on Nov. 15.
     
Norway's foreign minister announced Friday that the country had turned down a U.S. request to receive the bulk of Syria's chemical weapons for destruction because it doesn't have the capabilities to complete the task by the deadlines given.
     
The announcement came among renewed fighting in Syria. Al-Qaida-linked rebels battled government troops for control of the Christian town of Sadad north of Damascus, activists said.
     
The rebels have been trying to seize the town for the past week, and residents in the rebel-held western neighborhoods of Sadad are trapped in their homes, said Rami Abdurrahman of the Britain-based Syrian Observatory of Human Rights.
     
The rebels appear to have targeted Sadad because of its strategic location near the main highway north from Damascus rather than because it is inhabited primarily by Christians. But extremists among the rebels are hostile to Syria's Christians minority, which has largely backed President Bashar Assad during the conflict.
     
The official Syrian news agency said troops wrested back control of eastern parts of Sadad, but were clashing in other areas.