BEIRUT — Syrian troops rushed dozens of tanks and reinforcements Wednesday toward Aleppo, the country’s commercial capital, in a bid to crush a rebel advance that has spread to wide swaths of the sprawling city.
Meanwhile, Turkey has closed its border with Syria to commercial traffic, but the United Nations’ refugee agency said the border would remain open to those fleeing the conflict in Syria and that hundreds of people had made their way to safety in the past 24 hours.
Sporadic skirmishes in Aleppo broke throughout the day, with the rebels claiming to have attacked and burned down several police stations. Government helicopters circled, residents said, peppering embattled neighborhoods with machine-gun fire and an occasional rocket while ground troops lobbed an occasional mortar round.
There were no serious engagements reported. But all signs indicated one was looming. After withdrawing all visible security forces, even traffic police, for a day, Syrian army troops arriving in trucks or buses suddenly deployed around the historic 13th-century citadel.
Thousands more were en route, according to rebel fighters and activists.
“We are expecting a big attack on Aleppo,” Mohammed Saeed, an activist based in Aleppo, told The Associated Press. “People are worried they might face random shelling while fleeing.”
Residents in the outlying districts said refugees from the inner part of the city had taken over schools and parks to live in.
Tanks and troops normally deployed in nearby Idlib province began to head east toward Aleppo after suhur, the morning meal that comes before sunrise during the month-long Ramadan holiday, fighters and activists said.
One column of an estimated 23 armored vehicles carrying soldiers and ammunition out of Jebel az-Zawiya, a rebel stronghold in southern Idlib, was attacked by local fighters, according to a local activist in Turkey who said he was in touch with the insurgents. Roughly a third of the vehicles were destroyed but the rest moved on toward Aleppo, he said.
Some rebels reached via Skype said they, too, were headed toward Aleppo, anticipating a showdown.
The fighters in Idlib said they were preparing to exploit the sudden absence of government forces to leverage their area into more of an independent zone than they had been able to achieve in the past.
Nidal Qarra Mohammed, a member of the revolutionary council in Idlib province, said the commanders of all the various militant factions intended to meet in a town near the Turkish border to declare their joint effort to make Idlib a safe zone free of government control.
Mohammed said some fighters had left Idlib for Aleppo after seeing Syrian army soldiers pull up stakes and head there. He said they had also received calls previously asking for fighters to travel to Damascus.
Beyond Aleppo, clashes were reported in several major cities, including in Damascus and in Rastan, an insurgent enclave near Homs.
Activists say the death toll in Syria after 17 months of fighting has reached 19,000 people.
At a news conference in Damascus, Herve Ladsous, the head of U.N. peacekeeping operations globally, said half the 300 monitors first deployed in May had been sent home as the monitoring mission has now changed to a political one attempting to start political negotiations between the two sides. Its mandate expires in 27 days.
TURKEY CLOSES BORDER
Turkish customs officials announced Wednesday that they were closing the 566-mile border after the seizure of two crossing points by Syrian rebel forces last week. At one crossing point about 30 miles from Aleppo, Bab al-Hawa, dozens of Turkish trucks were burned or looted when the rebels seized control, the AP reported.
Turkish off icials said Wednesday’s decision affects three border posts still open at Cilvegozu, Oncupinar and Karkamis.
Turkish authorities have given assurances that the border is still open to people seeking to cross for humanitarian reasons, Sybella Wilkes, a spokesman for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, said Wednesday.
“We do know that people have continued to cross,” she said.
Wilkes said about 300 Syrian refugees crossed the border Tuesday night into Turkey, joining more than 44,000 people the refugee agency reported have fled the fighting in recent months. Turkish authorities are building two camps capable of holding about 20,000 people to accommodate the continuing flow of refugees, the agency said.
With fierce fighting over the past week in Damascus most refugees in recent days have fled to Lebanon or south to Jordan, with an average of 1,200 to 1,300 crossing the borders every day, Wilkes said.
BLAIR ISSUES WARNING
Meanwhile, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair said Wednesday that the West must do all it can to persuade Syrian President Bashar Assad to step down but warned that the country would face acute divisions if Assad is ousted.
With a loosely linked group of rebel forces trying to overpower the regime, Blair said in an interview with the AP that he fears unifying the country would be the toughest challenge in a post-Assad Syria.
“It’s very clear that in the end this regime will change,” said Blair, who serves as special envoy for the Quartet on the Middle East, a diplomatic peace initiative. “What we’ve got to do is to hasten its end because the truth is, it’s lost the ability and the legitimacy to govern the country, but we’ve then got to work with everybody to construct the aftermath in the right way.
“The sooner it ends the sooner the slaughter will end and also the sooner you can try and repair what will now be deep, deep hatreds amongst parts of the community there,” Blair said in London after appearing at a conference organized by Beyond Sport, a group that uses sports to promote social development.
U.N. General-Secretary Ban Ki-moon said Wednesday that the world must unite in its response to Syria’s civil war and do all it can to stop what he called the slaughter taking place there.
Speaking in Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Ban said other countries intervened in Libya and the Ivory Coast to stop widespread killing there, but failed during Bosnia’s 1992-95 war to prevent Bosnian Serbs from killing more than 8,000 Muslim Bosnians in Srebrenica while the town was officially under U.N. protection.
But Ban did not say in his speech exactly what the international community should do in Syria beyond already calling for Assad to step down.
ARABS CALL ON U.N.
Arab nations announced plans Wednesday to go to the U.N. General Assembly and seek approval of a resolution calling for a political transition and establishment of a democratic government in Syria after the Security Council’s failure to address the escalating crisis.
Saudi Arabia’s Ambassador Abdallah al-Mouallimi and Qatari diplomat Abdulrahman Al-Hamadi announced plans to seek action by the 193-member world body, where there are no vetoes, during a Security Council debate on the Middle East.
Last week, Russia and China again vetoed a Western-backed Security Council resolution aimed at pressuring Assad’s government to stop the violence.
“The Arab states have decided to head to the General Assembly over the situation in Syria,” al-Mouallimi told the council.
‘DEPTH OF DEPRAVITY’
Also Wednesday, the White House said the Syrian government’s assault on Aleppo illustrates what it called “the depth of depravity” by Assad’s regime.
White House spokesman Jay Carney said the administration has seen “credible” reports about the regime’s use of military hardware in Aleppo, Syria’s largest city. Carney said Assad was using its forces to “perpetrate heinous violence” against the city’s civilian population.
Carney also pointed to defections by Syrian ambassadors to Cyprus and the United Arab Emirates are an indication that officials in Assad’s circle are “fleeing government because of the heinous actions taken by Assad.”
Wednesday’s resignation by Abdel Latif Dabbagh, the Syrian envoy to the United Arab Emirates, was not totally unexpected. He is married to Lamia al-Hariri, the Syrian ambassador to Cyprus, who defected a day earlier, said Mohammed Sarmini, a spokesman for the Syrian National Council, the main opposition group in exile. Syria’s ambassador to Iraq, Nawaf Fares, announced his defection July 11.
FEARS HEIGHTEN IN ISRAEL
In another development, Israelis rushed to get government-issue gas masks Wednesday, the latest sign of mounting fears that Syria’s chemical-weapons stockpiles could be used against them as the crisis there deepens.
Syria on Monday threatened to unleash chemical and biological weapons if the country faces a foreign attack; Syria is believed to have nerve agents as well as mustard gas.
Israeli officials are more worried about the possibility that the weapons could fall into the hands of Islamic militants from Lebanon’s Hezbollah or other groups should the regime fall.
“For us, that’s a casus belli, or red line,” Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said Wednesday. He told Israel Radio that the government would act immediately to prevent that from happening as tensions rise along Israel’s northern border.
The fighting also has hit too close for comfort with the thud of exploding mortar shells on Syrian territory near the Israeli-annexed Golan Heights, captured from Syria in 1967. That has drawn Israelis with binoculars to a strategic plateau, seeking a glimpse of the battle and expressing concern for their nearby homes.
Information for this article was contributed by Neil MacFarquhar, Dalal Mawad, Hwaida Saad and Nick Cumming-Bruce of The New York Times and by Elizabeth A. Kennedy, Paul Schemm, Suzan Fraser, Natalya Vasilyeva, Adam Schreck, Rob Harris, Amy Teibel, Karin Laub, Diaa Hadid, Blake Sobczak, Edith M. Lederer and Aida Cerkez of The Associated Press.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 07/26/2012