Aleppo: Syrian rebels vowed to fight on in Aleppo a day after being driven out of a key district under heavy shellfire by the army, which targeted other parts of the strategic city on Friday. That came as world powers were preparing to name veteran Algerian diplomat Lakhdar Brahimi as their new envoy to seek a peaceful and politically workable end to a 17-month uprising that has cost more than 21,000 lives.
Negotiations were still underway over the envoy’s role and how the UN will operate in Syria amid the intensifying civil war. The mandate of the UN mission in the country ends on August 20. An official announcement of the 78-year-old’s appointment is expected to be made early next week, diplomats said. Brahimi was the UN envoy in Afghanistan after the September 11, 2001 attacks and in Iraq after the 2003 US-led invasion.
Kofi Annan, a former UN secretary general, resigned from the post saying he had not received enough international support for his efforts to end the conflict but is staying on until August 31. Meanwhile, the exiled opposition said that Aleppo’s historic citadel, part of a Unesco-listed world heritage site, had suffered damaged in the bombardment of rebel-held areas that has accompanied the army’s ground offensive in Syria’s commercial capital, now in its third day. A rebel commander, Hussam Abu Mohammad, said his men were still fighting in parts of Aleppo’s southwestern district of Salaheddin after most fled on Thursday in the face of heavy bombing and advancing troops. “We will not let Salaheddin go,” the Free Syrian Army’s Abu Mohammed told AFP by telephone as the third day of a government offensive to take the city raged. The army again bombed parts of Salaheddin, as well as the Sakhur and Hanano districts in the east of the city, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said, adding that the latest violence killed two civilians, among 11 killed nationwide. Just before dawn, a MiG 21 fighter jet dropped four bombs on rebel positions in Hanano, an AFP correspondent reported. One struck the courtyard of the FSA headquarters in the neighbourhood and another a nearby house, wounding a number of people. Angry residents shouted hostile slogans against France and the United States, saying: “No one is helping us.”
“We are behind the Free Syrian Army, but it is because of them that all of this is happening,” one of them lamented.
The opposition Syrian National Council (SNC) said Aleppo’s 13th-century citadel, part of a complex of sites in the city’s historic heart that the UN Education, Scientific and Cultural Organisation says is of “outstanding universal value” had been damaged in army shelling.
“Photographs by activists and archeological associations show that the Aleppo citadel... has been damaged,” it said.
One photograph distributed by the group appeared to show damage to the citadel’s entrance.
“The way in which the shell hit the main entrance of the fortress and broke the marble panel bearing its name suggests that the Syrian regime intentionally targeted the site,” the SNC charged. It was not immediately possible to independently verify the opposition’s claim of damage to the citadel.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory said the army had shelled the area around the fortress several times in recent days.
The state SANA news agency published photographs on Thursday of troops in control of the citadel. They showed no signs of damage.
