DAMASCUS - A deadly car bomb tore through a mainly Christian Damascus suburb Monday while Syrian warplanes pounded Aleppo province, killing dozens of people, as the opposition pleaded for arms and intervention.
The violence came as the chief of the Red Cross headed to Damascus on a humanitarian mission, his office said, and new UN-Arab League peace envoy to Syria Lakhdar Brahimi admitted his task is “nearly impossible.”
The high-profile visits come as violence escalates in Syrian flashpoints and the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported more than 5,000 people, mainly civilians, were killed in August alone. A government air strike on a home in the heart of Aleppo killed an entire family, including seven children, witnesses told an AFP correspondent in Syria’s second city.
The bodies of the children were laid out under fly-ridden blankets in the back of a yellow pick-up truck outside the northern city’s main hospital before a hurried funeral, the correspondent reported. “This is all one family,” said tailor Hassan Dalati, who survived the raid on Al-Sultan street in the city of 2.7 million people.
A fighter jet also struck in the nearby town of Al-Bab, killing at least 10 men, six women and two children, with more unaccounted for beneath the rubble of levelled homes, said the Observatory. The pre-dawn raid on a building being used as a shelter followed repeated overflights by military aircraft during the night, residents said.
The Observatory gave a preliminary toll of 84 people - 41 civilians, 26 soldiers and 17 rebel fighters - killed Monday in Syria after 132 people were killed the previous day.
In Madrid, the main opposition Syrian National Council appealed to the international community for weapons and urgent military intervention to defend civilians from such bombardments.
Meanwhile, Lebanon’s premier said on Monday that Beirut will urgently protest to Damascus over Syria’s violations of its territory, warning of “negative repercussions” on the stability of the border areas.
“Prime Minister Najib Mikati asked the ambassador of Lebanon to Damascus Michel Khoury... to send an urgent letter to the Syrian Ministry of Foreign Affairs to say that Syrian posts continue to shell Lebanese border villages,” he said in a statement.
“These violations could have negative repercussions... on stability and calm at the border,” despite “security measures taken by the Lebanese army,” said Mikati.
Shelling from Syria into Lebanon and cross-border shootings have become near-daily occurrences in recent months according to Lebanese officials, and the spillover of the conflict has worried the international community.