A second
year of incidents taking place in Syria will soon draw to an end, as the Syrian
crisis have turned into a civil war that claimed the lives of over 70 thousand
people.
In this
context, the United Nations High
Commissioner for Refugees warned on Sunday that the number of the displaced Syrians could
be doubled if the crisis drags on, adding that Syria has entered a phase of “total
disaster”.
Meanwhile, clashes broke out and the
neighborhood of Baba Amro was shelled by warplanes, as the opposition forces
have staged an attack in the neighborhood.
Earlier, the Syrian National Coalition has
postponed a meeting to form a provisional government, in the latest setback to
opposition efforts to create an administration to take over if President Bashar
al-Assad is ousted, coalition sources said on Sunday.
The meeting to elect a provisional
prime minister, which was due to be held on March 12 after being postponed once
already, has been rescheduled for March 20, but it was uncertain it would be
held even then, the sources said.
Meanwhile, anti-regime activists said that the Syrian
government has bombed the northwestern city of Raqqa, killing at least seven
people less than a week after rebel fighters seized most of the city from
government troops.
An activist video posted online shows the dead
bodies of seven people lying in a street with buildings destroyed nearby. An
off-camera narrator says they were killed in an airstrike. The video appeared
authentic and corresponded with other reporting done by The Associated Press.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human
Rights said Sunday that the attack took place the day before.
Raqqa was the first provincial capital in Syria
to fall under rebel control.
This as, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees
Antonio Guterres said there could be two or three times the current one million
registered Syrian refugees outside the country by the end of 2013 if the rise
in numbers continues at its current rate.
"If this escalation goes on, we will have
- and nothing happens to solve the problem - we might have in the end of the
year a much larger number of refugees, two or three times the present
level," Guterres told reporters in Ankara.
REUTERS/LBCI