Defectors set up council to unify ranks

Damascus: Syria's rebel fighters have set up a military council to unify their ranks and political opposition leaders called a meeting of all the dissident groups to forge common objectives as deadly violence swept the country.

With the violence that monitors say has claimed more than 9,000 lives over the past year showing no signs of abating, the military and political opponents of President Bashar Al Assad piled the pressure on his regime.

The rebel Free Syrian Army (FSA) said it had merged with a unit led by the most senior army deserter, General Mustafa Al Shaikh, to form a united military council aimed at closing ranks in the face of the regime's unrelenting crackdown.

At the same time the main political opposition group, the Syrian National Council, invited all factions seeking to topple the Al Assad regime to meet in Turkey on Monday to hammer out a "national pact" of common objectives.

Speaking from Turkey, FSA chief Riad Al Asa'ad told AFP in Beirut that the new military council "is a step towards guaranteeing the unity of the troops and armed forces [of the opposition] on Syrian territory."

Al Shaikh would chair the council, an FSA statement said, while a lieutenant from his unit said that Al Asa'ad would be in charge of military operations.

Al Asa'ad "will control all brigades and all [local] military councils [across Syria] must place themselves under his jurisdiction," Lieutenant Khaled Ali said in Beirut.

General Al Shaikh and 10 other generals will be tasked with deciding the military strategy of the Free Syrian Army, and will be in charge of weapons and funds, he added.

The SNC said in a statement that the aim of the two-day meeting in Istanbul was to produce a "National Pact for a New Syria," and eradicate "the regime's dictatorship".

SNC member Mohammad Al Sarmini said invitations had been extended to all the factions and members of the opposition, including three prominent figures who resigned from the SNC in mid-March.

Struggling opposition

Syria's fragmented opposition has struggled to remain united in the face of the regime's deadly crackdown on dissent that began more than a year ago.

The latest announcements by the opposition come ahead of the second "Friends of Syria" conference, which world powers are due to attend on April 1 in Istanbul.

The opposition's lack of unity and transparency has stood in the way of Western and Arab governments giving it military backing — an option favoured however by Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

On the ground blasts rocked the flashpoint city of Homs yesterday as Syria's regime pressed its assault on protest hubs, while rebels attacked a military base in Damascus province, activists and monitors said.

There was "heavy shelling of Khaldiyeh, Hamidiyeh and Old Homs neighbourhoods by the regime's army, and explosions shook the whole city," the Local Coordination Committees said.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based monitoring group, said in a statement that three people were wounded in the Homs district of Safsafa.

In the city of Hama to the north, the Observatory reported that army shelling killed one civilian in the neighbourhood of Murk.

And in the southern town of Nawa, "tanks have entered the main streets, and heavy gunfire by regime forces is reported," said the LCC, the main opposition activist group in Syria. Five troops and three mutinous soldiers were killed.

Bridge hit

Nawa is in the southern Daraa province, where the popular uprising against Al Assad's iron-fisted rule erupted in March 2011. Monitors say 9,100 people have been killed since then.

The Observatory said an explosion hit a bridge in the Daraa region of Lajat where many army deserters are reported to be.

In the north, near the border with Turkey, rockets were fired into the town of Aazaz as helicopters flew overhead, the LCC said in a statement sent to AFP in Beirut.

It added that rebel fighters of the Free Syrian Army blocked a highway used by the military for reinforcements and supplies to Aazaz, the scene of fierce clashes for the past few weeks.