BEIRUT - Syrian staterun TV reported Friday that the leader of a powerful al-Qaida-linked rebel group had been killed - a claim that if confirmed would be a blow to fighters trying to topple President Bashar Assad. At least one rebel commander denied the report.
Meanwhile, Syrian troops killed at least 40 opposition fighters in an ambush near Damascus, the government said, leaving their bloodied bodies strewn on rocks near a dried-out lake along with scattered rifles and ammunition.
Abu Mohammad al-Golani, the leader of Jabhat al-Nusra, also known as Nusra Front, was reported killed Friday. The group has emerged as one of the most effective among rebel groups fighting Assad.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which closely monitors the fighting in Syria, said senior Nusra Front leaders contacted by activists in Latakia and the eastern Deir el-Zour province denied al-Golani had been killed.
Other Nusra Front sources said they could not confirm or deny the report “because contact with al-Golani was cut,” the Observatory said in a statement. A rebel commander in a Damascus suburb said he believed al-Golani was “alive and well” on the basis of his contacts with other fighters including those from Nusra Front. He declined to elaborate or be identified for security concerns.
State TV said al-Golani was killed in the coastal province of Latakia. It did not say when or give other details. News of his death was not mentioned in the main headlines of the TV’s late-night news bulletin.
Al-Golani, who fought previously in Iraq, is a shadowy figure who is believed to have spent time recently in rebellious suburbs south of Damascus. Rebels have also gained footholds in mountainous regions of Latakia, which is largely loyal to Assad, and he may have gone there to direct fighting.
The Nusra Front is on a U.S. State Department list of terrorist organizations. The group has claimed responsibility for numerous suicide bombings against government targets.
Al-Golani gained prominence in April when he rejected an attempted takeover of the group by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the head of the Islamic State of Iraq, revealing a growing rift within al-Qaida’s global network.
Al-Golani at the time distanced himself from claims that the two groups had merged into a group called the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. Instead, he pledged allegiance to al-Qaida’s leader, Ayman al-Zawahri.
He said that al-Baghdadi’s announcement of the merger was premature and that his group would continue to use Jabhat al-Nusra as its name.
The group is more popular in Syria than the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, which is largely made up of foreign fighters and has been criticized for its brutality and for trying to impose a strict version of Islamic law in areas under its control.
Al-Golani’s death could strengthen the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant at a time of growing infighting between al-Qaida extremists and the more moderate rebels from the mainstream Free Syrian Army.
Assad’s forces have been gaining ground in rebel-held areas around the capital, the seat of his power, and have made progress against outgunned and fragmented fighters in several areas.
On Friday, the state-run Syrian Arab News Agency said 40 rebels died in the ambush near Otaiba, adding that soldiers seized a large arms cache, including anti-tank rockets.
The area is part of a region known as Eastern Ghouta, which was the scene of a chemical-weapons attack in August believed to have killed hundreds.
The state-run Al-Ikhbariya television station broadcast footage showing more than a dozen bodies near the largely dried-out Otaiba Lake, some wearing flak jackets strapped with ammunition. Automatic rifles and hand grenades lay nearby.
An unidentified Syrian army officer in the area told Al-Ikhbariya that foreign fighters were among the dead and that the ambush followed an intelligence tip. The dead also included Nusra Front members, the government said.
The Observatory said at least 24 fighters, some of them foreign, were killed in the ambush, but it gave no further details and the differing death tolls could not be immediately reconciled.
North of Damascus on Friday, rebels and government forces clashed for a fifth-consecutive day in the Christian town of Sadad. Al-Qaida-linked groups captured a checkpoint earlier this week that gave them control of the western part of the town.
Archbishop Silwanos Al-Nemeh said as many as 3,000 civilians were trapped, and he appealed for international organizations to help civilians flee the area.
BOMBING KILLS 40
In other violence, a car bomb blew up near a mosque in the village of Wadi Barada outside of Damascus shortly before Friday prayers ended. The Observatory said 40 people were killed in the blast and dozens wounded. SANA reported that the car blew up as it was being rigged with explosives. The agency said a number of people were killed.
Elsewhere on Friday, top United Nations official told the Security Council that a recent appeal for humanitarian access in Syria has made little difference and implored the world body to exert more pressure on the warring parties to allow the delivery of aid to millions of people trapped in the conflict.
The Syrian war has left more than 100,000 people dead and driven nearly 7 million more from their homes, according to the U.N.
The message from Valerie Amos, the undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs, further laid bare how ineffective the Security Council has been in addressing Syria’s 2 ½-year-old civil war amid divisions between the United States and other Western powers, which support some of the rebel groups, and Russia, which backs Assad.
Diplomats had characterized a humanitarian appeal three weeks ago as a hopeful step toward overcoming the paralysis. It came immediately after the council’s first binding resolution on Syria that ordered the elimination of its chemical weapons.
Unlike the weapons resolution, which threatened consequences for noncompliance, the humanitarian statement was nonbinding.
Amos said the Syrian regime and rebel groups have largely ignored it.
She said the U.N. has not been able to reach 2.5 million people trapped in besieged areas, many of whom have been isolated for more than a year, and warned that the situation will worsen as winter descends on millions living in makeshift shelters.
Already, diseases are spreading because of lack of access to basic hygiene and vaccinations, including reports of the first outbreak of polio in Syria in 14 years, officials said.
U.N. officials said Friday that they were mobilizing to vaccinate 2.5 million young children in Syria and more than 8 million others in the region to combat what they fear could be an explosive outbreak of polio, the incurable virus that cripples and kills.
The U.S. and British ambassadors said they were horrified by Amos’ presentation and that council members should urgently consider further action to get aid into Syria.
The push for more aid coincided with an international push for a peace conference to be held in Geneva, expected next month. No final date has been set, however, and it is unclear whether the sides will reach an agreement on the agenda.
The Supreme Military Council, which brings together a collection of loosely-knit rebel brigades under the emblem of the Free Syrian Army, said Friday that it refused to sit down with Syrian officials involved in killing Syrians. Comments carried by the Syrian National Coalition, the group’s political wing, also dismissed the proposed talks for lacking a way to reach concrete results.
Also Friday, Norway rejected a U.S. request for it to receive the bulk of Syria’s chemical weapons for destruction, saying it doesn’t have the capabilities to complete the task by the deadlines set by an international chemical watchdog.
The United Nations has set a mid-2014 deadline for the destruction of Syria’s arsenal - a deadline Boerge Brende, the newly appointed foreign minister, said was too tight for Norway.
Officials at the U.S. Embassy in Oslo and at the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons in The Hague, Netherlands, which is leading the mission to dismantle Syria’s stocks of poison gas and nerve agents, offered no immediate comment on the effect of Norway’s decision.
In a statement Friday on the mission - part of a joint effort by Russia and the United States after an attack using poison gas in a Damascus suburb Aug. 21 - the chemical-weapons organization said its inspectors in Syria had visited 19 of 23 sites disclosed by the Syrian authorities and had undertaken “functional destruction activities of critical equipment” at almost all of them.
OLYMPIC SECURITY REQUEST
Meanwhile, Russian President Vladimir Putin is turning to the U.S. for help protecting the Winter Olympics in Sochi from attacks by Islamic extremists, including hundreds of jihadists now fighting in Syria.
About 400 Russians, mainly from the North Caucasus, are currently battling Assad’s forces in Syria, and their return poses a “big threat,” said Sergei Smirnov, deputy director of the Federal Security Service, the main successor to the Soviet KGB.
As Russia prepares to seal off Sochi, a Black Sea resort of 345,000 people, it’s reaching out to the U.S. and about 80 other nations for help identifying potential threats from abroad, said Alexei Lavrishchev, a senior Federal Security Service official.
At the top of the list are the Russian militants in Syria, whose numbers may be triple what the security agency is saying publicly, according to the Russian Institute of Strategic Studies in Moscow, which expects a third of those fighters to return home.
Information for this article was contributed by Zeina Karam, Albert Aji, Elaine Ganley, Karl Ritter, Michael Corder, Bassem Mroue, Alexandra Olson and staff members of The Associated Press; by Alan Cowell and Rick Gladstone of The New York Times; and by Ilya Arkhipov and Henry Meyer of Bloomberg News.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 10/26/2013