http://www.arabnews.com/node/1292311/middle-east
AMMAN, Jordan: The Syrian army on Thursday intensified its bombardment of a besieged camp for Palestinian refugees and nearby rebel-held areas in southern Damascus, the last area near the capital outside government control.
Most civilians have long since fled the Yarmouk camp, once the largest in Syria for Palestinian refugees, but enough have stayed behind that the United Nations has called on the warring parties to spare civilians.
The Russian-backed Syrian army launched a major offensive last week to capture the south Damascus enclave that includes Yarmouk and neighboring areas, which have been held for years by rebel fighters and Daesh militants.
The Yarmouk campaign is part of a wider offensive to recapture remaining rebel areas that has shown no sign of letting up since Western countries launched air strikes on April 14 to punish the government for a suspected poison gas attack.
President Bashar Assad’s is now in by far his strongest position since the early months of the seven-year civil war.
Pierre Krähenbühl, commissioner of the United Nations Works and Relief Agency which runs camps for Palestinian refugees, warned of the “catastrophic consequences of the escalation” in the camp, which had “endured indescribable pain and suffering over years of conflict.”
State media showed footage of a ground assault led by tanks on the fringes of Hajjar Al-Aswad, which adjoins the
sprawling Yarmouk camp. Aerial strikes and bombardment have relentlessly pounded residential areas for days.
The army said it had made advances and killed dozens of militants. Rebels in the area say however that there has been no significant push inside Hajjar Al-Aswad or the camp, despite hundreds of strikes.
At least 19 civilians have been killed and 150 injured since the campaign began, mostly women and elderly, according to Ayman Abu Hashem, a lawyer and former camp resident in touch with residents who have stayed. The sprawling camp was part of a densely populated, impoverished squatter belt only few kilometers away from the heart of the capital.
Two sources inside the camp said around 1,500 families remain there.
Christopher Gunness, a UNRWA spokesman, said the plight of remaining civilians had worsened: “Many are sleeping in the streets, begging for medicine. There is almost no water or electricity. Their suffering is unimaginable.”
The camp has been under siege by the army since rebels captured it in 2012. Most civilians fled when Daesh militants drove out comparatively secular rebels in 2015, but thousands remained behind, many of whom have fled this week.
At least 3,500 Palestinian refugees from the camp have in the last week taken shelter in the nearby town of Yalda, according to UNRWA and a resident who confirmed the figure.
Yalda is not controlled by Daesh fighters but by rebels who have long abandoned fighting under de facto cease-fire deals with the army. The government aims to push them to leave the area for northern Syria under an evacuation deal.
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http://www.arabnews.com/node/1292671/middle-east
BEIRUT: Syrian regime air strikes and shelling killed 17 civilians including seven children on Friday in the Palestinian camp of Yarmuk in southern Damascus, a Britain-based monitor said.
Regime forces have pounded southern districts of the capital since April 19 to try, as they claimed to expel Daesh group from the area, after the militants refused to leave under an evacuation deal.
That bombardment intensified on Friday, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitor said, as regime forces advanced against Daesh inside the districts.
“Army units backed by the air force and artillery have advanced on numerous axes” in southern Damascus, including the district of Hajjar Al-Aswad, “after breaking through terrorist defenses,” state news agency said.
The advance “inflicted great human and material losses” on the militants, it said.
Syrian state television said the army has seized control of buildings and a “network of trenches and tunnels” from Daesh in Hajjar Al-Aswad.
In the adjacent neighborhood of Qadam, two children were killed in “mortar rounds fired by terrorist groups,” it said.
The Observatory said pro-government forces took control of “buildings and streets in Hajjar Al-Aswad and Qadam after attacking the districts at dawn.”
Regime forces were locked in violent clashes with Daesh fighters on Friday morning, the monitor said.
Heavy air strikes and shelling had targeted Yarmuk and the edges of Hajjar Al-Aswad and Qadam since the early morning.
IS has held parts of Hajjar Al-Aswad and Yarmuk since 2015 and seized Qadam last month.
At least 74 regime personnel and 59 Daesh fighters have been killed in eight days of fighting in southern Damascus, the monitor said.
The latest civilian deaths bring to 36 the number of non-fighters killed in regime bombardment in that same period, it said.
Yarmuk and the surroundings are now Daesh’s largest urban redoubt in Syria or neighboring Iraq.
Turkish armed forces on Friday seized arms and ammunition in Syria’s northwestern Afrin region, which was recently liberated during the Operation Olive Branch.
In a message posted on its official Twitter account, Turkish General Staff said a large amount of ammunition, a machine gun, 4 Kalashnikov assault rifles, a bazooka, 12 hand grenades, and a radio were recovered in Afrin’s Dervisoglu region.
Turkey launched Operation Olive Branch on Jan. 20 to clear YPG/PKK and Daesh terrorist groups from Afrin, northwestern Syria amid growing threats from the region.
On March 18, Turkish-backed troops liberated the Afrin town center, which had been a major hideout for the YPG/PKK terrorists since 2012.
According to the Turkish General Staff, the operation aims to establish security and stability along Turkey’s borders and the region as well as to protect Syrians from the oppression and cruelty of terrorists.
Separately, security forces launched an operation against PKK/KCK terrorist organization in southeastern Hakkari's Ordekli village, according to a statement by local governor's office.
During the operations, a M-16 infantry rifle, a AK-47 automatic rifle, four hand grenades, a vehicular radio and a good deal of ammunition were seized.
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Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said Thursday the U.S. will expand its operations in Syria despite President Donald Trump's stated willingness to withdraw from the war-torn country.
"We are continuing the fight [against Daesh]," Mattis said during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on the Defense Department budget.
"We are going to expand it and bring in more regional support; [it] is probably the biggest shift that we are making right now."
Emphasizing the presence of anti-Daesh coalition members in the region, he said the fight will continue until Syria is completely cleared of Daesh.
Mattis also said operations against Daesh would increase on the Iraqi side of the border while France had reinforced the U.S. in Syria with special forces in the last two weeks.
Earlier this month, Trump said U.S. troops would be leaving Syria "very soon" since Daesh had been defeated, arguing that U.S. spending in the Middle East was futile and detracted from domestic spending.
But the Pentagon described reports of plans to pull American troops out of Syria as "rumors", adding the U.S. would continue fighting Daesh there. Trump later agreed to keep them in the country for the short term.
At a recent joint news conference with French President Emmanuel Macron at the White House, Trump again noted that he wanted American troops to return from Syria but also did not want Iran to strengthen its influence in the region, especially after the defeat of Daesh.
During the hearing, Mattis was also asked for his opinion on whether the U.S. should stick with the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), commonly known as the Iran deal.
Clashing with Trump, who considers the 2015 Iran nuclear accord “insane” and the “worst deal ever”, Mattis highlighted the value of some parts of the agreement, adding that Washington is working with its European allies to see if there are ways to improve the pact.
But Trump has repeatedly attacked the deal and has threatened to pull out of it unless Washington and its European allies strike a side deal with conditions largely unrelated to the original agreement that would cover Iran's ballistic missile program and regional activities.
When asked, Mattis said no decision had been made on any U.S. withdrawal.
"The decision has not been made whether we can repair it enough to stay in it, or if the president is going to decide to withdraw from it," he said during the hearing.
The U.S. recognizes that the nuclear pact was an "imperfect arms control agreement", he said.
"I will say it is written almost with an assumption that Iran would try to cheat. So the verification, what is in there, is actually pretty robust,” he added. “Whether or not that is sufficient, I think that is a valid question."
