REPORT: At least 3 dead, 28 injured by attack in Damascus

At least three civilians were killed and 28 others wounded on Monday when mortar shells fell over a neighborhood in southern Damascus, SANA news agency reported.         

Earlier in the day, Syrian warplanes bombed the shattered Baba Amr district in the central city of Homs on Monday, a day after rebels made a surprise push into their former bastion, which had been in army hands for a year.
   
The communally mixed city of Sunni Muslims and Alawites, the minority sect that has dominated Syria since the 1960s, has been a major battleground in a two-year-old revolt against President Bashar al-Assad that has claimed about 70,000 lives.
   
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which monitors the conflict, quoted an opposition activist in Baba Amr as saying   the planes had attacked the outskirts of the district, which was now partially controlled by rebel units.
   
Homs, 140 km (88 miles) north of Damascus, lies on a road juncture linking army bases on the Mediterranean coast, home to many Alawites, and government forces in the capital Damascus.
   
Sunni rebels punched through army lines in the north and west of Homs on Sunday to loosen a months-long military siege on their strongholds in the centre of the Syria's third biggest city, opposition sources said.
   
Homs-based activists said there were "light clashes" in Baba Amr on Monday.
    
This as the U.N. Human Rights Council said that neither side in the Syrian civil war is doing enough to protect civilians.
     
In an update Monday, the Geneva-based council says some 2.5 million Syrians have been internally displaced and a further million have fled the country as refugees.
     
It says "failure to resolve this increasingly violent conflict will condemn Syria, the region and the millions of civilians caught in the crossfire to an unimaginably bleak future."
   
It says government forces are targeting civilians in bakery lines and funeral processions, while anti-government forces continue to use protected objects, such as mosques, as bases or for weapons storage.
     
The council says both sides are showing "insufficient respect for the protection of the civilian population."
     
The update report covered Jan.15 to March 3, 2013.     

Meanwhile, Al Qaeda has claimed responsibility for killing 48 Syrian soldiers and state employees in Iraq last week, saying their presence proved collusion between the  Shi'ite-led government in Baghdad and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.              

Unidentified gunmen last week attacked a convoy of Syrians who had fled across the border into Iraq from a Syrian rebel advance, and were being escorted back home through the western province of Anbar, Iraq's Sunni Muslim heartland.                     

"Military detachments succeeded in annihilating an entire column of the Safavid army," al Qaeda's Iraqi wing, Islamic State of Iraq, said in a statement posted online, referring to the dynasty that ruled Shi'ite Iran from the 16th to 18th centuries. Tehran is Assad's closest regional ally.                      

"The lions of the desert and the men entrusted with difficult missions laid ambushes on the road leading to the crossing," it said.                   

The group said the presence of the Syrians in Iraq showed the Baghdad government's "firm co-operation" with Assad. The Syrian leader's Alawite faith is an offshoot of Shi'ite Islam.                       

Iraq's Defense Ministry has blamed the attack, which also killed nine Iraqi soldiers, on Syrian armed groups it said had infiltrated the country.  

On another note, a Ukrainian journalist kidnapped by Syrian rebels last October has escaped from her captors and is now on her way to the Syrian capital Damascus, her nephew said on Monday.     

The Ukrainian foreign ministry confirmed that Anhar Kochneva was free, though it had no word on the circumstances. "We expect her to be at the Ukrainian embassy in Damascus tomorrow," a ministry spokesman said.    

Kochneva's nephew, Dmitry Astafurov, was quoted by Interfax news agency saying: "She escaped this morning. We spoke by telephone with her for a couple of minutes. She said people were taking her to Damascus."    

Kochneva, who had been reporting for Russian media outlets from Syria, was taken hostage near Homs by members of the Free Syrian Army (FSA), the main armed opposition force in the two-year revolt against President Bashar al-Assad.

Syria's conflict began with anti-regime protests in March 2011 and later spiraled into civil war. The U.N. says more than 70,000 people have been killed so far.


Diplomacy:

European Union foreign ministers are meeting to discuss ways to end the violence in Syria, wracked by a civil war that has killed an estimated 70,000 people.
     
Some debate may concern altering the EU's arms embargo against the country to allow munitions to be funneled to rebels trying to overthrow the regime of Bashar Assad. Britain has pushed for some changes to the embargo. And Gen. Salim Idris, head of the rebel army, travelled to Brussels last week to plead for arms from the international community.
     
But diplomats from other countries say more guns is the last thing Syria needs. EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton, on her way into the meeting Monday in Brussels, backed a political solution.
     
"We need to stop the killing," Ashton said.


REUTERS/AP


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