BEIRUT/ALEPPO – Syrian army shells crashed into Damascus and its suburbs on Wednesday as opponents of President Bashar Al-Assad reported a widening campaign by the regime to sow fear and death in rebel strongholds to shore up grip on the capital 17 months into the popular uprising. Anti-Assad activists said at least 47 people had been killed in Damascus in what they called the heaviest bombardment this month. “The whole of Damascus is shaking with the sound of shelling,” said a woman in Kfar Souseh, one of several districts hit during the military offensive to root out rebel fighters. At least 22 people were killed in Kfar Souseh and 25 in the nearby district of Nahr Eisha, activists said. One of the dead was named as Mohammad Saeed Al-Odeh, a journalist employed at a state-run newspaper who was sympathetic to the anti-Assad revolt. Activists said he had been executed in Nahr Eisha. “There are 22 tanks in Kfar Souseh now and behind each one there are at least 30 soldiers. They are raiding houses and executing men,” an opposition activist in Kfar Souseh, who gave his name only as Bassam, said by Skype. Activists there described it as another “hit-and-run” assault. Similar attacks have been reported in several areas ringing the capital in recent weeks, as troops and shelling intensify then fade, as the government kills and leaves. Analysts said the effort underscores the challenge that Assad faces as he tries to defeat an insurgency that often slips away only to resurface. “Terror is the basic approach,” said Paul Salem, director of the Carnegie Center for the Middle East. “From the beginning of the uprising the logic was hit and hit hard, punish and scare, and that would be the way to do it.” More than 250 people, including 171 civilians, were killed across Syria on Tuesday, mostly around Damascus, Aleppo and the southern city of Deraa, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a British-based opposition monitoring group. Activists in the southwestern Damascus suburb of Mouadamiya said Assad's forces had killed 86 people there since Monday, half of them by execution. The conflict threatens to destabilize neighbors including Lebanon, where violence flared for a third day. The death toll from the fighting in the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli rose to at least 10 with more than 100 wounded, medical sources said. In Syria, Assad's forces have lost swathes of territory in recent months, but have fought back hard in Damascus and in Aleppo, the country's biggest city and commercial hub until it became a theater for urban warfare. Journalists in Aleppo heard gunfire and shells exploding every minute. Rebel fighters trying to advance in Saif Al-Dawla, a front-line Aleppo district, encountered mortar and rocket-propelled grenade barrages. At one point, their escape route was cut off by gunfire as tank shells exploded nearby. Syrian government forces also fought rebels on Wednesday for control of a military base and airfield near the eastern town of Albu Kamal on the Iraqi border, according to a local Iraqi official and a Syrian rebel commander. — Agencies
