Syrian President Bashar al-Assad made a rare public appearance for the Muslim holiday of Eid yesterday as activists staged protests across the country to rage against the regime.
We can be proud of the significant contribution we are making to the fall of the Assad regime
Mr Assad joined prayers at a Damascus mosque for the Eid al-Fitr festival, his first appearance in a public place since a bomb blast last month killed four top security officials, although he has been seen on TV since then.
But despite the religious holiday, his forces were still in deadly action on the ground, shelling several rebel hubs across the country and clashing with armed opposition fighters in Damascus itself.
Six children, one as young as five and including four from the same extended family, were killed when shells struck near their home in the rebel-held town of Maaret al-Numan in the province of Idlib, according to the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
In all, at least 48 people died in violence on the first day of Eid, the festival celebrated by Muslims across the world to mark the end of the holy month of Ramadan.
UN observers were winding up their troubled mission yesterday in the face of the escalating violence and a failure by world powers to agree on how to tackle Mr Assad and bring about peace to the strategically vital Middle East state.
Meanwhile, press reports said British and German spies were involved in covert operations to help Syrian rebels.
“We can be proud of the significant contribution we are making to the fall of the Assad regime,” an official from Germany’s BND foreign intelligence service told Bild am Sonntag.
The paper said German spies were stationed off the Syrian coast and also active at a Nato base in Turkey, a one-time Syria ally whose government is now staunchly opposed to Mr Assad and is sheltering Free Syrian Army (FSA) rebels.
Britain’s Sunday Times said British intelligence was helping rebels launch successful attacks on government forces with information gathered from their listening posts in nearby Cyprus.
It said the most valuable intelligence has been about the movements of troops towards the flashpoint commercial hub of Aleppo, which is now partly controlled by rebels and is the scene of some of the fiercest fighting.
The regime’s far superior military might has failed to suppress the armed rebels, whose determination to bring Mr Assad down has only grown with the passing of time despite a shortage of heavy arms.
What began as a peaceful uprising has descended into an armed revolt with fighting reaching the two main cities of Damascus and Aleppo and atrocities reported on both sides, but particularly by the regime.
The West is demanding that President Assad step down as part of any political deal but is opposed by Syria’s traditional allies in Moscow and Beijing, which see it as foreign-imposed regime change.