Rebels capture third border post

Syrian rebels captured a third border crossing with Turkey from President Bashar Al Assad's forces on Sunday, rebel commanders and a Turkish official said.

"The Free Syrian Army has taken control of the Bab  Al Salam crossing, but Assad's forces are bombarding our positions from afar," said Ahmed Zaidan, spokesman for an opposition group called the Higher Council of the Revolution's Leadership.

Syrian insurgents seized control of the Syrian side of the Bab Al Hawa and Jarablus crossings with Turkey last week, while Iraqi officials said Assad's forces regained control of one of two border crossings seized by rebels on the frontier with Iraq.
A Turkish official at the border confirmed that Bab Al Salam was in rebel hands. He said the Turkish side of the border gate - which normally operates mainly for commercial traffic from Turkey to the Syria city of Aleppo - remained open but there was no traffic.

A senior Syrian army defector in Turkey, Staff Brigadier Faiz Amr, said Bab Al Salam was taken at 8:45 am and Assad's troops quickly fled. 

"Seizing the border crossings does not have a strategic importance but it has a psychological impact because it demoralises Assad's force," he told Reuters by phone.

"It's a show of progress for the revolutionaries, despite the superior firepower of Assad's troops."

Amr said that his men in Syria had informed him that government forces stationed in Aleppo province were repositioning to Aleppo city, where Syrian troops and armoured vehicles have pushed for two days into rebel-held districts.

Meanwhile, Syrian forces bombarded three districts of Damascus with helicopter gunships on Sunday, witnesses said, clawing back territory from rebels a week after the fighters launched what they called a final battle for the capital.

Fighting also raged around the main intelligence headquarters in Syria's biggest city, Aleppo -- the country's main commercial and industrial hub -- and in Deir Al Zor on the Euprhates river, the largest city in the east.

Rebels were driven from Mezze, the diplomatic district of Damascus, residents and opposition activists said, and elite Fourth Division troops were besieging the northern neighbourhood of Barzeh, one of three northern areas hit by helicopter fire.
The fourth division is run by Assad's younger brother, Maher Al Assad, 41.

His role has become more crucial since Assad's defence and intelligence ministers, a top general and his powerful brother-in-law were killed by the bomb on Wednesday.

Assad has not spoken in public since the bombing. Diplomats and opposition sources said government forces were focusing on strategic centres, with one Western diplomat comparing Assad to a doctor "abandoning the patient's limbs to save the organs".

Syrian state television quoted a media source denying that helicopters had fired on the capital. "The situation in Damascus is normal, but the security forces are pursuing the remnants of the terrorists in some streets," it said.

Assad's forces, who also pushed into a rebel-held district in the northerly commercial hub of Aleppo on Saturday, targeted pockets of lightly armed rebels, who moved about the streets on foot and attacked security installations and roadblocks.

Residents said the sound of shelling in the capital was so intense at dusk that they were unable to distinguish it from the traditional cannon blast marking the end of the daily fast for Ramadan.

Opposition activists said late on Saturday that helicopters had fired rockets into a neighbourhood near the southerly Sayida Zeinab district, causing dozens of casualties.

"In Damascus, people continue to search desperately for safety," the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said in a statement in Geneva.
 "Humanitarian needs are growing as the situation in the city worsens and as large numbers of people flee their neighbourhoods in search of safe haven. The ICRC and the Syrian Arab Red Crescent have intensified their response to the situation."

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an opposition group that monitors the violence, said 18 0 people, including 48  troops, ha d been killed across Syria on Saturday. Many of them died in the province of Homs, epicentre of the uprising.

Most shops in Damascus were closed and there was only light traffic - although more than in the past few days. Some police checkpoints, abandoned earlier in the week, were manned again.

Many petrol stations were closed, having run out of fuel, and those that were open had huge lines of cars waiting to fill up. Residents reported long queues at bakeries.  
 
FLIGHT FROM ALEPPO

U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said he was sending his peacekeeping chief Herve Ladsous and top military adviser General Babacar Gaye to Syria to assess the situation.  

Opposition activists in Aleppo said hundreds of families were fleeing residential areas on Saturday after the military swept into the Saladin district, which had been in rebel hands for two days.
Fighting was also reported in the densely-populated, poor neighbourhood of Al Sakhour. 

"The sound of bombardment has been non-stop since last night. For the first time we feel Aleppo has turned into a battle zone," a housewife, who declined to be named, said by phone from the city.   
 
REBEL BORDER CROSSING RAID

On the Iraqi-Syrian border, Iraqi security and border officials said Syrian forces had reasserted control over the Yarubiya crossing point on the Syrian side of the frontier, briefly seized by rebels on Saturday.
Syrian opposition activists said several towns in Syria's Kurdish northeast had passed - without a fight - into local hands in recent days as central authority eroded.

The surge in violence has trapped millions of Syrians, turned sections of Damascus into ghost areas, and sent tens of thousands of refugees fleeing to neighbouring Lebanon.

The U.N. Security Council has approved a 30-day extension for a ceasefire observer mission, but Ban has recommended changing its focus to pursuing prospects for a political solution - effectively accepting there is no truce to monitor.

Diplomats said only half of the 300 unarmed observers would be needed for Ban's suggested plan, and several monitors were seen departing from Damascus on Saturday.

Speaking two days after Russia and China vetoed a resolution to impose U.N. sanctions on Assad's government, Ban called on the Security Council to "redouble efforts to forge a united way forward and exercise its collective responsibility".  

 "The Syrian government has manifestly failed to protect civilians and the international community has collective responsibility to live up to the U.N. Charter and act on its principles," he said. 

Regional and Western powers have voiced concern the conflict might become a full-blown sectarian war that could spill across borders. But Assad's opponents remain outgunned and divided. 

French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius, speaking after contacts with the head of the Arab League and Qatar's prime minister, said all three agreed that it was time for Syria's fractured opposition to prepare to take charge of the country.

"We would like to see the rapid formation of a provisional government representing the diversity of Syrian society," said Fabius.

Syria's main political opposition group, the Syrian National Council, operating in exile, has so far failed to unite Assad's disparate foes on a united political platform.
 

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