At least 17 killed in air, mortar attacks in Syria

 
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said on Tuesday that Kurds in Syria declared a "general alert" against Jihadists.

This comes as Mortar attacks and air raids in two major cities in Syria killed at least 17 people, activists and government officials said, as a Kurdish opposition leader was killed in the north.      

The deadliest attack struck the central city of Homs, which has been an opposition stronghold since the beginning of the two-year conflict and is now the target of a withering offensive by President Bashar Assad's forces.          

Three mortars slammed into a government-held district of Dablan before dawn Tuesday, killing 10 people and wounding 26 others, a government official said, adding that many living in the neighborhood fled there to escape fighting elsewhere in Homs.          

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said 11 people including a child were killed, and the attack happened late Monday close to midnight. The Observatory is citing hospital sources in Homs.           

The attack came hours after government forces took control of another district in the city, Khaldiyeh that has been a rebel stronghold since the start of the 2-year-old conflict.                          

Turkish troops:                 

The Turkish military said on Tuesday Turkish soldiers shot into the air and fired tear gas to prevent hundreds of people, many of them believed to be smugglers, from trying to cross into Turkey from Syria.                  

A group of 1,500-2,000 people tried to approach the border and threw stones at military patrol vehicles sealing the Turkish border at the town of Ogulpinar in Hatay province in the early hours of Tuesday.            

Soldiers dispersed the group by firing tear gas after issuing warnings in Arabic and Turkish, the military said. It was the second such incident in as many days.         

The military said around 1,000 people had tried to enter Turkey illegally on Monday and that it had seized some 6,000 liters of diesel from them.                In a separate confrontation in the same region, Turkish soldiers fired pre-emptive shots at a group of 300-350 people on horseback who were also trying to cross the border on Tuesday.          

Smuggling of fuel and other goods has risen on Turkey's 900 km (560 mile) frontier with Syria, triggering a growing number of confrontations over the past month and underscoring Ankara's concerns that Syria's more than two-year-old civil war is fueling lawlessness and dragging in neighboring states.        

Turkish troops have been wounded and have returned fire in a spate of border incidents over the past month.           

A Turkish border patrol last week killed a civilian trying to cross illegally into Syria after the group of men he was with opened fire.       

Italian priest:  

Al Qaeda-linked fighters in a rebel-held eastern Syrian city on Monday abducted a prominent Italian Jesuit priest who championed the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad, activists said.             

Members of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant kidnapped father Paolo Dall'Oglio while he was walking in Raqqa, which fell to militant Islamist brigades in March, the sources in Raqqa province told Reuters.                             

Syrian authorities expelled Dall'Oglio from the country last year for helping victims of Assad's military crackdown while he served at a sixth-century monastery in the Anti-Lebanon Mountains north of Damascus.               

He has been an advocate of reconciliation for the country's myriad religious and ethnic sects, especially between Kurds and Arabs, as Syria slipped into civil war. Dall'Oglio blamed Assad for provoking sectarian mayhem and called his forces "thugs."            


REUTERS/AP