UN-Arab League envoy for Syria Lakhdar Brahimi meets with Egyptian Foreign Minister Nabil Fahmy in Cairo yesterday.

AFP/Damascus


A suicide car bombing and assault on a checkpoint in a key Damascus neighbourhood killed 16 soldiers yesterday, as the UN-Arab League envoy began a regional push for peace talks.
A UN official meanwhile called for a ceasefire elsewhere in the Damascus suburbs to evacuate thousands of Syrians from areas besieged by regime forces for months, where some people are reportedly eating cats and dogs to survive.
State media blamed the early-morning blast at the entrance to the mixed Christian-Druze suburb of Jaramana on “terrorists”, the regime term for rebels, and said 16 civilians were wounded.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said a suicide bomber from the Al Qaeda-linked Al Nusra Front detonated an explosives-packed car at the checkpoint between Jaramana and rebel-held Mleha.
Heavy fighting followed, with rebel mortar fire hitting Jaramana and 16 soldiers and 15 jihadists killed, said the Britain-based Observatory, which relies on activists and medics on the ground.
The clashes raged for several hours in the important regime-held area, as government aircraft launched four strikes to repel the rebels, said observatory chief Rami Abdel Rahman.
One resident said the fighting was of an “unprecedented” level since Syria’s conflict erupted in March 2011, and that mortar rounds crashed into Jaramana both in the morning and afternoon.
“It is very violent; we can hear automatic weapons fire, mortar rounds, bombardments,” he said by telephone.
The conflict, which erupted after President Bashar al-Assad launched a bloody crackdown on Arab Spring-inspired democracy protests, is believed to have killed more than 115,000 people.
Millions more have been forced to flee the country and hundreds of thousands are trapped by the fighting.
UN humanitarian chief Valerie Amos yesterday called for a ceasefire in the Damascus suburb Moadamiyet al-Sham, where thousands of people were evacuated last week and where she said “the same number or more remain trapped”.
The US a day earlier had condemned the regime’s relentless siege of rebel-held Moadamiyet al-Sham and Eastern Ghouta on the capital’s outskirts, and said it must allow relief convoys in.
There were “unprecedented reports of children dying of malnutrition-related causes in areas that are only a few miles from Bashar al-Assad’s palace in Damascus”, said State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki.
“The regime’s deliberate prevention of the delivery of life-saving humanitarian supplies to thousands of civilians is unconscionable,” she said.
Residents of Moadamiyet al-Sham told AFP this week that food is running desperately low and that children have died in some areas. A local cleric said he has issued a religious ruling allowing the eating of dogs and cats.
UN-Arab League envoy Lakhdar Brahimi meanwhile met with Egypt’s foreign minister yesterday, saying “intense efforts” were under way to convene Syrian peace talks in Geneva next month.
But prospects for the meeting remain unclear, with Syria’s opposition divided and due to vote next week on whether to take part, and the Assad government saying he will not bow to rebels and quit.
Brahimi was to meet the head of the Arab League today and then head for talks in Syria itself and Iran, a key backer of the Assad regime.
The push for the Geneva talks will also be high on the agenda of US Secretary of State John Kerry, who heads to Europe to attend a “Friends of Syria” meeting in Britain on Tuesday.
The renewed push for peace talks comes after Damascus accepted in September a US-Russia deal to hand over its chemical arsenal for destruction.
But the political opposition remains divided amid tensions on the battlefront between mainstream fighters and jihadists, as well as growing rifts between rebels fighting on the ground and the external opposition.
The main National Coalition opposition bloc said members will decide next week whether to attend the Geneva talks, while coalition member Syrian National Council has threatened to quit if they do.
Meanwhile, Al Qaeda loyalists of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) have captured at least 35 rebels from the mainstream Free Syrian Army in the northern city of Aleppo, the Observatory said.
Tensions between FSA loyalists and the ISIS have spiralled in recent months, especially in northern Syria, where rebels control vast swathes of territory.

Suspected polio cases detected

Two suspected cases of polio have been detected in Syria, the first appearance of the incurable viral disease there in 14 years, the World Health Organisation (WHO) said yesterday.
The UN body said initial test results from a cluster of cases of acute flaccid paralysis in the eastern province of Deir al-Zor in early October had come back positive for the crippling disease.
The WHO is still waiting for final test results from its regional reference laboratory. Wild poliovirus was last reported in Syria in 1999.
“The Ministry of Health of the Syrian Arab Republic confirms that it is treating this event as a cluster ... and an urgent response is currently being planned across the country,” the Geneva-based WHO said in statement.
“Syria is considered at high-risk for polio and other vaccine-preventable diseases due to the current situation.”