Syrian rebels capture and execute 18 soldiers in Aleppo
International Peace Envoy Lakhdar Brahimi is to head to Damascus today (Thursday) to meet Syria’s President Bashar al Assad, an Arab diplomat in Cairo said, as fresh bloodshed gripped the north of the country.
In a single incident, rebels killed at least 18 soldiers in a car bomb and ground attack on a military position in northwest Syria, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
Separately, four Syrian Armenians were killed and 13 injured in the war-battered commercial capital Aleppo on the way home from the airport after a trip to Yerevan.
“Twenty soldiers escaped, and clashes are still going on,” he added, saying details of the incident were still sketchy and that he could not say whether the car bombing was a suicide attack.
He also said rebels had encircled two other army positions near Saraqeb and fired rockets on checkpoints elsewhere in the province.
Meanwhile, the army shelled a string of neighbourhoods in central Aleppo, including Suleiman al Halabi, Sheikh Khodr and Qadi Askar, the Britain-based observatory said.
Helicopter gunships also strafed the rebel district of Bustan al Basha, a witness said, and the observatory reported that rebels used rocket-propelled grenades to attack a security branch in the adjacent Midan neighbourhood.
Elsewhere, a boy and a girl were killed and dozens of civilians injured when the army shelled the rebel village of Latamneh in the central province of Hama, said the observatory, which gathers its information from a wide network of activists.
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