BEIRUT — Syrian army helicopters fired on neighborhoods in the embattled city of Aleppo on Friday morning, killing at least a dozen people, activists said, as outside observers reacted with growing alarm to the prospect of a siege in Syria’s largest city.
Residents fled neighborhoods shaken by random shelling and sporadic clashes in a city starved of fuel and bread.As the military cordon tightened around Aleppo, making it harder to escape, informal refugee camps popped up in parks and streets, residents said.
A rebel commander said he had seen about 80 Syrian government tanks on the city’s southern outskirts Friday. “They are preparing to reoccupy neighborhoods taken over by the rebels,” said the commander, Lt. Malek al-Kurdi, reached by telephone in Syria. “They need a huge force.”
The top U.N. human-rights official, Navi Pillay, warned of an “imminent confrontation” in Aleppo in comments Friday in Geneva. Civilians in the city are caught between a military that has shown little restraint and the opposition’s armed militias, which are reportedly being joined by bands of foreign fighters.
Al Watan, a pro-government newspaper, warned in a front-page headline Friday that the “mother of all battles” was looming in Aleppo.
Saying she had received unconfirmed reports of “atrocities” during continuing fighting in the suburbs of Damascus, Pillay spoke of “a discernible pattern.” The army, she said, had been surrounding villages and cities and cutting off electricity, water and food before bombarding the town.
“Then tanks move in, followed by ground forces who proceed door-to-door and reportedly often summarily execute people they suspect of being opposition fighters,” she said, adding that other people were detained. The bodies of some who were killed were burned or taken away, she said.
Pillay also cited a growing number of reports of atrocities by opposition fighters, including the abuse or execution of prisoners. Adding to a growing chorus of international concern, Russia, which has been among the staunchest allies of President Bashar Assad of Syria, voiced its own misgivings Friday about the standoff in Aleppo.
In an interview with the Russian state news agency, Deputy Foreign Minister Gennady Gatilov of Russia said: “For us this is not an empty question. There are tens of thousands of our citizens there.”
He also indicated that Russia was not opposed to provisions in a draft U.N. resolution calling for Syria to make a transition to a democracy, but said sanctions remained “unacceptable to us.”
His comments came as the International Committee for the Red Cross announced it was withdrawing some of its expatriate workers from Damascus because of fears that their safety was threatened by the escalating violence in the 17-month-old conflict. The announcement came a day after the Syrian Arab Red Crescent suspended its first-aid activities in Aleppo, because of what a spokesman said was a “lack of respect” for vehicles and facilities bearing the Red Crescent logo.
A Red Cross spokesman, Carla Haddad Mardini, said that the Red Cross was not suspending its activities and that a core team of about 50 staff members would remain.
The former head of the U.N. observer mission said Friday that he expected the Assad regime to fall eventually but that the aftermath could witness even more bloodshed.
“It’s impossible to imagine a future in Syria where the current people in power remain in power. So in that view, it’s just a matter of time before this regime collapses,” Maj. Gen. Robert Mood said at a news conference in Oslo.
Mood, who left Damascus on July 19, warned that the regime still has a great deal of military muscle. The core of the army, which has vast reservoirs of weaponry, has remained loyal to Assad.
Activists in Aleppo said more than a dozen people were killed after a missile fell near a vegetable market in the Ferdoss neighborhood. Majed Abdel Nour, a spokesman for the Shaam News Network in Aleppo, an anti-government group, reported a “massive exodus” from Ferdoss and said civilians also fled the nearby neighborhood of Bustan al-Qasr after clashes between rebel fighters and soldiers at two government checkpoints.
“They have nowhere to go, so they stay in the streets or in public gardens,” said Abu Raed, a resident and an activist. “What’s new today is that the regime started shelling the displaced.”
About 30 miles west of Aleppo at the Turkish border, at a windswept police post near the town of Reyhanli, there were few refugees. In the past few weeks, hundreds of Syrian families have made it there, but by midafternoon Friday, there was just one - a father, mother and two wide eyed children sitting in the back of a military truck, looking lost. The sound of huge explosions thudded across the mountains. “The army has completely surrounded Aleppo, so the refugees can’t make it to the border,” one Turkish smuggler said.
At least one government defector did escape. Opposition figures said Friday that a member of the Syrian parliament from Aleppo province had defected and crossed into Turkey. The lawmaker, Ikhlas Badawi, was elected in May to a parliament that was seen as a rubber stamp for Assad’s Baath Party. The elections were dismissed by opposition figures as a sham. After arriving in Turkey, Badawi said, “I had no more strength to bear the cruelty,” according to Turkey’s semiofficial news agency.
The government’s opponents, anxious for news of cracks in Assad’s government, have hailed the defections of even minor functionaries. “We will work on helping her and making her feel at ease,” said George Sabra, a member of the Syrian National Council, the largest Syrian opposition group. “The regime is isolating patriots.”
Among the reports of unrelenting violence across Syria on Friday, the killing of a 6-year-old boy who was trying to leave Syria stood out.
The mother of the boy, Bilal el-Lababidi, said Syrian troops opened fire on her family as they crossed through farmland toward Jordan’s border with Syria.
As the family ran, Bilal broke away from his mother, dashing ahead until he was stopped by a bullet that caught him in the neck.
Also, two Western photojournalists held captive in Syria for a week by Islamic militants were rescued by Syrian rebels, one of the men said Friday.
Jeroen Oerlemans, a Dutch photographer, told Business News Radio of the Netherlands that he is not sure which group held him and John Cantlie of Britain, but said he is sure they were not Syrian.
In other developments, Poland on Friday closed its embassy in Syria and evacuated its diplomats. The embassy had represented U.S. interests in the country in recent months.
Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski said he made the decision out of concern for the security of the embassy’s staff members, who have already left Syria.
Information for this article was contributed by Kareem Fahim, Neil MacFarquhar, Dalal Mawad, Hwaida Saad, Jeffrey Gettleman, Sebnem Arsu, Nick Cumming-Bruce, Andrew Roth and Rick Gladstone of The New York Times;by Alexandra Sandels and Patrick J. McDonnell of the Los Angeles Times; and by Jamal Halaby, Dale Gavlak, Toby Sterling, Raphael Satter, Paul Schemm, Bassem Mroue and John Heilprin of The Associated Press.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 07/28/2012