BEIRUT - The Syrian government released 13 female detainees, an official and an activist group said Wednesday, in a move that was seen as part of an ambitious regional prisoner exchange.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the women walked out of the headquarters of the Damascus provincial government Tuesday morning, but the group hasn’t been able to contact them. A Syrian government official confirmed the women’s release, but declined to provide further details. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to brief the media.
It was not immediately clear whether the women released were part of a complicated hostage swap last week brokered by Qatar and the Palestinian Authority that saw Syrian rebels release nine Lebanese Shiite Muslims, while Lebanese gunmen simultaneously freed two Turkish pilots.
Lebanese officials have said a third part of the deal called for the Syrian government to free a number of female detainees to meet the rebels’ demands.
The agreement illustrated how far Syria’s civil war, now in its third year, has spilled across the Middle East.
Syria’s crisis began in March 2011 with largely peaceful protests against President Bashar Assad, and it slowly turned into an insurgency and then a full-blown civil war. More than 100,000 people have been killed in the conflict, while another 2 million have sought refuge from the violence abroad.
The fighting also has destroyed many cities and shattered much of Syria’s economy, including its infrastructure.
Syria’s state news agency said a blackout hit much of the country after an attack Wednesday that damaged the gas pipeline supplying power stations in the nation’s south.
SANA quoted Electricity Minister Imad Khamis as saying maintenance crews were working to restore power. The minister blamed the attack on “terrorists,” a term the government uses to refer to those trying to topple Assad.
It was not immediately clear how extensive Wednesday’s blackout was.
North of Damascus, rebels and government forces clashed for the third-consecutive day Wednesday in the Christian town of Sadad, forcing desperate residents to flee.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said fighters from the two al-Qaida-linked groups, Jabhat al-Nusra and the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, captured a checkpoint that gave them control of the western part of the town. It said frightened residents were heading north to the central city of Homs about 35 miles away.
The rebels appear to have targeted Sadad because of its strategic location near the main highway north from Damascus rather than because it is inhabited primarily by Christians.
In The Hague, Netherlands, the organization that’s overseeing the destruction of Syria’s chemical-weapons program said its inspectors have visited 18 of 23 sites declared by the government. The group said it expected to meet a Nov. 1 deadline to make all the declared chemical-weapons production facilities in the country inoperable.
Three teams of inspectors from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons had carried out “functional destruction activities” at almost all the sites, spokesman Michael Luhan said. The teams of inspectors have had “good access” to sites so far, and the Syrian government was cooperating, he said.
Also on Wednesday, a Dutch court found two men guilty of preparing to travel to Syria to fight with rebels battling to oust Assad, verdicts that prosecutors say will help other such cases in the future.
Wednesday’s convictions by a court in Rotterdam are the first in the Netherlands of suspects who wanted to join rebels in Syria’s civil war.
The court convicted one suspect of making preparations for murder and another for preparing to detonate explosives.
One of the suspects was sentenced to a year in prison and the other was ordered to spend a year in a psychiatric hospital. Their full identities were not released.
Information for this article was contributed by Mike Corder and staff members of The Associated Press.
Front Section, Pages 6 on 10/24/2013