Syrian airstrikes hit market, kill up to 30 in rebel-held town

Fire flares after government airstrikes Thursday in a rebel town in Aleppo province. Activists said bombs hit a crowded vegetable market.
Fire flares after government airstrikes Thursday in a rebel town in Aleppo province. Activists said bombs hit a crowded vegetable market.

BEIRUT - Syrian government airstrikes struck a vegetable market in a northern rebel-held town Thursday, killing up to 30 people and wounding scores of others, activist groups said.

Elsewhere on Thursday, a second Syrian lawmaker announced his candidacy for the country’s June presidential election, state media said, a poll President Bashar Assad is expected to win.

Fighter jets hit the crowded market in the Aleppo province town of Atareb early Thursday morning, killing 30 people, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said. The group, which documents the Syrian conflict through a network of activists, said the death toll is likely to rise because many of the victims were seriously wounded.

Another activist group, the Syria-based Local Coordination Committees, said the airstrikes killed 24 people. The Aleppo Media Center activist group said the strikes killed more than 20. The discrepancy in the death toll is not unusual in the immediate aftermath of such large attacks and could not be immediately reconciled.

Atareb is near the city of Aleppo, Syria’s largest urban center, its former commercial hub and a major battleground in the civil war.

The Syrian conflict began in March 2011 as largely peaceful protests against Assad’s rule. It turned into a civil war after some opposition supporters took up arms to fight a government crackdown on protesters. The fighting has taken on increasingly sectarian overtones, pitting predominantly Sunni Muslim rebels against Assad’s government, which is dominated by Alawites, a sect in Shiite Islam.

More than 150,000 people have been killed so far, activists have said, and millions have been driven from their homes.

Also Thursday, Hassan bin Abdullah al-Nouri, a lawmaker and a former minister, became the second candidate to register his bid for the presidency, officials said. A day earlier, a lawmaker from Aleppo announced his candidacy for the June 3 vote.

Al-Nouri was educated in the U.S. and is from a Sunni Muslim family in Damascus. He previously served in Assad’s government as a state minister for administrative and parliamentary affairs.

Assad has suggested he would seek a third, seven-year term, though he has not announced his candidacy yet. According to a new election law, the balloting must be contested by more than one candidate, but analysts see the law as a means to provide legitimacy for Assad’s expected win.

In Damascus, a spokesman for the United Nations agency that helps Palestinian refugees in the Middle East said aid workers resumed food distribution inside the Damascus camp of Yarmouk after 15 days of being prevented from entering the area. Chris Gunnes said aid workers from the U.N. Relief and Works Agency distributed 300 food parcels to residents Thursday.

A day earlier, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said neither side in the war has implemented a U.N. resolution demanding that the opposition and the Syrian government promptly allow access for humanitarian aid. Almost 3.5 million civilians in Syria have almost no access to aid, and people are dying needlessly every day, Ban said.

Also on Thursday, an international chemical weapons watchdog said 92. 5 percent of Syria’s chemical-weapons materials had been removed from the country and destroyed.

The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons said in a statement that its experts in Syria also have verified that Assad’s government had destroyed buildings, equipment and empty mustard gas containers, as well as decontaminated other containers in a number of chemical-weapons storage and production sites.

Syria has missed several deadlines to eradicate its chemical weapons, but insists it will meet a final June 30 deadline. It recently pledged to remove all chemicals by Sunday.

Meanwhile, as the war continues to draw Islamist fighters from other parts of the globe, British police said Thursday that officers would work with charitable organizations to prevent British Muslims from traveling to Syria to fight, urging women in particular to report would be jihadists “so that we can intervene and help.”

The move reflected growing concern among British and other European counterterrorism authorities that some of the hundreds of European Muslims fighting alongside Islamist forces in Syria could return home and commit terrorist attacks.

Scotland Yard said Thursday that officers arrested 40 people on charges relating to the Syrian conflict in the first three months of 2014, compared with 25 for all of last year. British authorities said about 400 Britons have traveled to Syria to join the fighting, and 20 of them have been killed, one of them in a suicide truck bombing.

Some Muslim leaders criticized the effort, saying the police’s role in it would serve as a deterrent.

Information for this article was contributed by Barbara Surk and Albert Aji of The Associated Press and by Alan Cowell of The New York Times.

Front Section, Pages 7 on 04/25/2014

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