Syrian car bomb kills at least 18, dozens wounded -monitoring group

    
At least 18 people, including women and children, were killed by a car bomb that went off near a school in the village of Al-Kafat in central Syria on Thursday, a monitoring group said.         

The death toll was likely to rise because some of the dozens of people wounded were in critical condition, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.         

Al-Kafat, in the central Hama province, is home to members of Syria's Ismaili Shi'ite Muslim minority. The rebels fighting to overthrow President Bashar al-Assad, an Alawite, are overwhelmingly Sunni.

Syria's chemical weapons:

Germany will help destroy Syria's arsenal of chemical weapons materials as part of an international disarmament programme, Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said on Thursday.         

The new Social Democrat (SPD) minister said countries with the technical capacity to help should not refuse.        

"Therefore we in the German government have decided not to shirk our responsibility and to make our contribution. That means getting rid of part of the chemical waste," he said at a news conference with his Danish counterpart.        

"The German armed forces have the technical capacity to do this in Munster," Steinmeier said.          

Syria has agreed to abandon its chemical weapons by June after a sarin gas attack last August that Western nations blamed on President Bashar al-Assad's forces. Damascus blamed the rebels For the attack.          

It has declared 1,300 tonnes of weapons to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) which is arranging for them to be destroyed abroad. This week some chemical weapons materials started moving out of the country onto a Danish ship.         

Government sources said Chancellor Angela Merkel had agreed the move with Steinmeier and Defence Minister Ursula von der Leyen on Wednesday.           

The decision could be controversial in Germany, which has a strong pacifist and anti-nuclear movement and has been reluctant to get involved in foreign missions, especially in the Middle East, since the end of World War Two.          

The sources said several hundred tonnes of very diluted materials, rather than chemical weapons, could come to Munster in northern Germany, home to a big army base.

Russia halts UN condemnation of Aleppo air raids:

Russia on Wednesday blocked a UN Security Council effort to denounce the Syrian government's air strikes on rebels in the city of Aleppo with Scud missiles and barrel bombs that have killed some 700 civilians.

The British-sponsored draft press statement would not have been enforceable but it could have been a building block toward a later resolution.

A UN diplomat, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the negotiations were private, said Russia introduced amendments that watered it down so it had no meaningful impact on the situation in Aleppo. Britain could no longer support the draft language.

Consensus agreement among the 15 Security Council members is required for adoption, so the draft was effectively killed.

Russia, Syria's key council ally, halted a similar American-sponsored draft statement in December that singled out Syria for condemnation, by loading it up with so many amendments that the US Mission could no longer support it.

The draft statement would also have condemned violence by all parties in the Syrian conflict. 


AP/REUTERS