REPORT: Assad says Europe will "pay price" if it arms rebels

         
Europe will "pay the price" if it delivers arms to rebel forces in Syria, President Bashar al-Assad said in an interview with a German newspaper.       

"If the Europeans deliver weapons, the backyard of Europe will become terrorist and Europe will pay the price for it," he said in an advance extract of an interview due to be published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on Tuesday.        

He also warned that delivering arms would result in the export of "terrorism" to Europe.         

In his first comments since the United States announced on Thursday that they would be supplying military aid to rebels fighting for his overthrow, Assad said: "Terrorists will gain experience in combat and return with extremist ideologies."          

This as European leaders and officials arrived in Northern Ireland on Monday for the Group of Eight (G-8) summit.          

Leaders from the US, Canada, Russia, Germany, France, Italy and Japan, as well as the 27-nation European Union are attending the two-day meeting at the Lough Erne resort, west of Enniskillen.        

Speaking hours ahead of the summit's official opening, British Prime Minister David Cameron said Russia, like all G-8 governments, has a responsibility to push opposed factions in Syria's civil war to the negotiating table as rapidly as possible and not to back a government that "butchers" its citizens.         

Cameron conceded there is a chasm in opinion Monday between Russia's Vladimir Putin and leaders of some other countries about the way ahead in Syria. Putin is holding bilateral meetings Monday with US President Barack Obama, French President Francois Hollande and Cameron before all discuss the Syrian impasse over a working dinner at the summit.          

Cameron said Russia and the West need to unite behind a diplomatic push that transitions Syrian President Bashar Assad from power. Russia supplies Assad's army with weapons and has its only Mediterranean port in Syria.         

US President Barack Obama authorized lethal aid to the rebels for the first time last Friday, after Washington said it had conclusive evidence that the Syrian regime had used chemical weapons.        

Russia, one of Syria's main allies, criticized Obama decision.           

Russia's Foreign Ministry spokesman Alexander Lukashevich said Russia, a veto-wielding member of the U.N. Security Council, will not permit no-fly zones to be imposed over Syria.         

"I think we fundamentally would not allow this scenario," Lukashevich told a news briefing, adding that calls for a no-fly zone showed disrespect for international law.

On the field:            

A car bomb targeting a checkpoint near a military airport in an upscale neighborhood of the Syrian capital has killed 10 soldiers and wounded 10 others, activists said Monday. 

The attack, which took place late Sunday in the Mazzeh district in western Damascus, comes as President Bashar Assad's forces press ahead with an offensive to regain territory they lost to the rebels trying to topple his regime.                                         

The army has scored major victories in key battlefields in western and central Syria in the past weeks, and is now setting its sights on the country's largest city, Aleppo, in the north, parts of which have been opposition strongholds.                                       

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said Monday that 10 soldiers died in the attack in Mazzeh and 10 were wounded. The upscale neighborhood houses several embassies and a military airport. The Observatory, which relies on a network of informants inside Syria, did not state how many were deaths or how many were injuries.

Syrian state media confirmed there was a blast near the military airport late Sunday but did not release any casualty figures.                                       

At least 93,000 people have been killed in Syria's conflict since it erupted in March 2011, according to a recent UN estimate.                                     

Millions have been displaced and the civil war is increasingly being fought along sectarian lines, pitting Sunni Muslims against Shiites. It is also threatening the stability of Syria's neighbors, including Lebanon and Iraq.                                             

Sunnis dominate the rebel ranks while the Assad regime is mostly made up of Alawites, an offshoot sect of Shiite Islam.                                         

Sectarian divisions deepened in the conflict a few weeks ago, when Lebanon's Iran-backed Shiite militant group Hezbollah joined the fight inside Syria on the regime's side. Earlier this month, Assad's troops dealt a major blow to the opposition forces after they pushed the rebels out of the strategic town of Qusair near the Lebanese border, largely with Hezbollah's help. 

The battle for Qusair shifted the balance of power on the battlefield in favor of the Damascus regime, which is now looking to keep the momentum and aims to take back control of Aleppo, the country's commercial hub. The rebels captured parts of the city last summer during an offensive in the north along the border with Turkey.                                           


 AP/ REUTERS


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