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| Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah speaks via a video link, during a ceremony to mark Islam's Prophet Muhammad's birth in the southern suburbs of Beirut, Lebanon, Friday, Jan. 25, 2013. Nasrallah, a staunch ally of the Syrian regime, said those who had dreamed about "dramatic changes" taking place in Syria should let go of their dreams. He said all military, political and international indications showed that President Bashar Assad's regime cannot be defeated. |
BEIRUT (AP)
-- Syria's army unleashed a barrage of rocket and artillery fire on
rebel-held areas in a central province Friday as part of a widening
offensive against fighters seeking to oust President Bashar Assad. At
least 140 people were killed in fighting nationwide, according to
activist groups.
The United Nations said a
record number of Syrians streamed into Jordan this month, doubling the
population of the kingdom's already-cramped refugee camp to 65,000. Over
30,000 people arrived in Zaatari in January - 6,000 in the past two
days alone, the U.N. said.
The newcomers are
mostly families, women, children and elderly who fled from southern
Syria, said Melissa Fleming, spokeswoman for the United Nations High
Commissioner for Refugees. She said the UNHCR was working with the
Jordanian government to open a second major camp nearby by the end of
this month.
Many of the new arrivals at
Zaatari are from the southern town of Daraa, where the uprising against
Assad first erupted nearly two years ago, the Britain-based Save the
Children said Friday.
Five buses, crammed with
"frightened and exhausted people who fled with what little they could
carry," pull up every hour at the camp, said Saba al-Mobasat, an aid
worker with Save the Children.
The exodus
reflected the latest spike in violence in Syria's civil war. The
conflict began in March 2011 after a peaceful uprising against Assad,
inspired by the Arab Spring wave of revolutions that toppled leaders in
Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Yemen, turned violent.
Despite
significant rebel advances on the battlefield, the opposition remains
outgunned by government forces and has been unable to break a stalemate
on the ground.
In Lebanon, the leader of the
Syria-backed Lebanese Hezbollah group, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, said
Friday in a speech that those who dream about "dramatic changes" taking
place in Syria should let go of their fantasies.
"Particularly
those who were expecting the fall of Damascus," he told supporters,
adding that military, political and international developments point to
the futility of such dreams.
Activists said
the army recently brought in military reinforcements to the central
province of Homs and launched a renewed offensive aimed at retaking
patches of territory that have been held by rebels for months.
An
amateur video posted online by activists showed rockets slamming into
buildings in the rebel-held town of Rastan, just north of the provincial
capital, Homs. Heavy gunfire could be heard in the background.
Another
video showed thick black and gray smoke rising from a building in the
besieged city. "The city of Homs is burning ... day and night, the
shelling of Homs doesn't stop," the narrator is heard saying.
Troops
also battled rebels around Damascus in an effort to dislodge opposition
fighters who have set up enclaves in surrounding towns and villages.
The troops fired artillery shells Friday at several districts, including
Zabadani and Daraya, according to the Britain-based Syrian Observatory
for Human Rights.
Another activist group, the
Local Coordination Committees, said regime warplanes carried out
airstrikes on the suburb of Douma, the largest patch of rebel-held
ground near Damascus.
Other video showed
devastation in the Damascus neighborhood of Arbeen, following what
activists said were two airstrikes there. A bleeding, wounded man can be
seen being helped out of the rubble of the destroyed building. The
videos appeared consistent with Associated Press reporting on the
fighting.
Last month, the UNHCR said it needed
$1 billion to aid Syrians in the Mideast, and that half of that money
was required to help refugees in Jordan.
The
agency says 597,240 refugees have registered or are awaiting
registration with the UNHCR in Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq and Egypt.
Some countries have higher estimates, noting many Syrians have found
accommodations without registering, relying on their own resources and
savings.
In Turkey, U.S. officials announced
that the United States was providing an additional $10 million in
assistance to help supply flour to bakeries in the Aleppo region.
Nancy
Lindborg, assistant administrator for the U.S. Agency for International
Development, said the aid would help provide daily bread for about
210,000 people for the next five months.
She said that with the new assistance, the United States was providing a total of $220 million to help Syrians.
"Too
many people - an unconscionable number of Syrians - are not able to get
daily bread, in addition to other supplies," Lindborg told journalists
after a visit to a Syrian refugee camp near Turkey's border with Syria.
In
a rare gesture, Syria's Interior Ministry called on those who fled the
country during the civil war to return, including regime opponents. It
said the government will help hundreds of thousands of citizens return
whether they left "legally or illegally."
Syrian
opposition figures abroad who want to take part in reconciliation talks
will also be allowed back, according to a ministry statement carried
late Thursday by the state SANA news agency.
If they "have the desire to participate in the national dialogue, they would be allowed to enter Syria," it said.
The
proposed talks are part of Assad's initiative to end the conflict that
started as peaceful protests in March 2011 but turned into a civil war.
Tens of thousands of activists, their family members and opposition
supporters remain jailed by the regime, according to international
activist groups.
Opposition leaders repeatedly
have rejected any talks that include Assad, insisting he must step
down. The international community backs that demand, but Assad has clung
to power, vowing to crush the armed opposition.
More than 60,000 people have been killed since the conflict began, according to the U.N.
Activists
also said two cars packed with explosives blew up near a military
intelligence building in the Syrian-controlled part of the Golan
Heights, killing eight. Most of the dead were members of the Syrian
military, the Observatory said.
The Syrian
government had no comment on the attacks, which occurred Thursday night
in the town of Quneitra, and nobody claimed responsibility for them.
Car
bombs and suicide attacks targeting Syrian troops and government
institutions have been the hallmark of Islamic militants fighting in
Syria alongside rebels trying to topple Assad.
Quneitra
is on the cease-fire line between Syria and Israel, which controls most
of the Golan Heights after capturing the strategic territory from Syria
in the 1967 war.
