54 killed in Syria bombing -activists

Leaders at an Islamic summit on Thursday urged a dialogue between the Syrian opposition and regime just as a new initiative for talks proposed by an anti-government leader appeared to be unraveling.
   
Like previous diplomatic initiatives on Syria, opposition chief Mouaz al-Khatib's call for talks made less than a week ago appeared doomed to failure. And with troops and rebels clashing for a second day around Damascus, frustrated Syrians dismissed the calls for dialogue as empty talk.
     
"All of this does not concern us," said Iyad, a Syrian fighter on the outskirts of the capital Damascus, which has witnessed heavy fighting in the last two days.
    
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose country is Syria's closest ally in the Middle East, attended the summit and said at a news conference Thursday that he supported dialogue. He added that Egypt, Turkey and Iran were moving toward cooperation on Syria. But he also defended Bashar Assad regime, warning against meddling in the domestic affairs of other countries.
    
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon also strongly welcomed al-Khatib's proposal for political talks and expressed hope that Syrian authorities would accept it.
     
He strongly criticized Syria's President Bashar Assad for using terrorists as a justification to kill civilians and shell villages.
     
The U.N. chief told a group of journalists Thursday that the Syrian crisis didn't start because of terrorism  but he said because Assad continued to kill his own people, terrorist elements are now taking advantage of the turmoil.
    
"He could have stopped this violence a long time ago and this political dialogue could have commenced a long time ago," Ban said. "But he has been continuously killing, and he has not been listening to his own people. That's why people, out of frustration, out of anger, they have been fighting against their own government."
    
The Syrian civil war is largely at a stalemate, with neither side making significant battlefield gains likely to bring about a military victory any time soon.
     
But the international community has been at a loss for ways to end the carnage, with both sides showing no real interest in a political settlement.
     
At the end of a two-day summit in Cairo, the 57-member Organization of Islamic Cooperation urged Syrian opposition forces and members of the regime whose hands are not tainted by violence to hold talks on resolving the nearly 2-year-old conflict.
    
In the final statement of the conference, they called for concrete efforts to reach a settlement "that would preserve the rights of the Syrian people and ensure the unity and the safety of their land."
    
Participants at the Cairo summit did not call on Assad to step down, but the meeting exposed conflicting views among Muslim and Arab nations about the Syrian civil war. At past summits, many nations, including Egypt, demanded that Assad go.
     
Egypt's Islamist President Mohammed Morsi, elected after an uprising ousted his authoritarian predecessor Hosni Mubarak, sharply criticized Assad's embattled regime in his address to the summit. But he did not directly call for him to go as he had in the past.

 
On the field:

About 5,000 refugees are fleeing Syria each day, seeking safe haven in neighbouring countries, the United Nations refugee agency said on Friday.
   
"This is a full-on crisis," Adrian Edwards, spokesman of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) told a news briefing in Geneva. "There was a huge increase in January alone, we're talking about a 25 percent increase in registered refugee numbers over a single month."
 
Meanwhile, fighting in Damascus subsided significantly on Thursday, a day after the heaviest clashes in months.
     
Clashes were inching closer to the heart of the city, but still were focused in outlying neighborhoods such as Qaboun, Jobar and Zamalka in the northeast. Government troops beat back rebels who had tried to take over Jobar.
   
Fighters in rebellious suburbs of Damascus have made several attempts to overrun the heavily guarded center of the city, but failed. As in other parts of the country, the fighting has reached a stalemate.
     
State-run television said rebels fired two mortar rounds at a bus station in the Qaboun neighborhood of Damascus, killing six people including three children and a woman. The TV, quoting an unnamed Interior Ministry official, said others were wounded in the attack.
    
The Observatory reported clashes and shelling between troops and rebels near Qaboun, saying several shells hit the neighborhood. It said the fighting occurred near the highway that links Damascus with the central city of Homs, Syria's third-largest.
   
In other areas, the Observatory reported heavy clashes between troops and rebels near the northern town of al-Safira, where there have been heavy clashes over the past weeks.
     
Al-Safira, south of the northern city of Aleppo, is home to military production facilities. The rebels have failed to advance in the area after weeks of intense clashes.
         
Meanwhile, an activist group said a bombing of a military factory in central Syria this week has killed 54 people.
     
Rami Abdul-Rahman of the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said Friday that the bombing took place in a government-controlled area Wednesday and that reports on it were slow to emerge.
     
He says a mini-van packed with explosives blew up near the factory in the village of al-Buraq while employees were waiting for busses after work. Abdul-Rahman says those killed included 11 women and that all were civilians. He says the factory makes military supplies, but not weapons.
     
Syria's state news agency reported the blast on Wednesday evening, saying "terrorists" detonated a car bomb near a factory. It said there was an unspecified number of casualties.
 

AP