REPUBLIKA.CO.ID, AMMAN - A missile struck the command centre of the main Syrian opposition force near Damascus on Wednesday, wounding its leader, activists said, and a soccer player was killed when a mortar bomb hit a stadium in the centre of the capital.
The missile attack on Liwa al-Islam Brigade, which is spearheading a three-week-old offensive that has given the opposition a foothold inside Damascus, deals a blow to efforts to undermine President Bashar al-Assad in his seat of power.
An opposition spokesman said Sheikh Zahran Alloush, founder of the brigade, was wounded but declined to give further details. "We cannot disclose Sheikh Zahran's condition," said the spokesman, Islam Alloush, who is also his cousin.
Scud-type missile
On Tuesday, Syrian used a Scud-type missile that killed at least 20 people in an opposition-held district of Aleppo, opposition activists said. In northern Aleppo, opposition activists said 25 people were missing under rubble of three buildings hit by a several-meter-long missile.
The use of what opposition activists said was a large missile of the same type as Russian-made Scuds against an Aleppo residential district came after opposition overran army bases over the past two months from which troops had fired artillery. As the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad, now a civil war, nears its two-year mark, rebels also landed three mortar bombs in the rarely-used presidential palace compound in the capital Damascus, opposition activists said on Tuesday.
The United Nations estimates 70,000 people have been killed in the conflict between largely Sunni Muslim opposition and Assad's supporters among his minority Alawite sect. An international diplomatic deadlock has prevented intervention, as the war worsens sectarian tensions throughout the Middle East.
A Russian official said on Tuesday that Moscow, which is a long-time ally of Damascus, would not immediately back UN investigators' calls for some Syrian leaders to face the International Criminal Court for war crimes. Moscow has blocked three UN Security Council resolutions that would have increased pressure on Assad.
Casualties are not only being caused directly by fighting, but also by disruption to infrastructure and Syria's economy. An estimated 2,500 people in an opposition-held area of northeastern Deir al-Zor province have been infected with typhoid, which causes diarrhea and can be fatal, due to drinking contaminated water from the Euphrates River, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Tuesday.
"There is not enough fuel or electricity to run the pumps so people drink water from the Euphrates which is contaminated, probably with sewage," the WHO representative in Syria, Elisabeth Hoff, told Reuters by telephone. The WHO had no confirmed reports of deaths so far.
Ikuti Whatsapp Channel Republika