Army assault kills 21 in Hama

An army assault on a rural area of the central Syrian province of Hama killed at least 21 people on Sunday, a monitoring group said. “The number of victims of a military operation in the area of Al Fan is likely to rise, because several people have been reported missing, while some of the wounded are in a critical condition,” said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. At least 1,600 people were killed last week in Syria in the deadliest seven days since the uprising against President Bashar Al Assad began in March 2011, the UN children’s fund Unicef said on Sunday. Spokesman Patrick McCormick provided the death toll of 1,600 and said it included some children. He did not immediately explain how he arrived at the figure. But there have been many reports from activists and witnesses of civilians killed in airstrikes that hit homes or residential areas. In the latest violence on Sunday, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the military pounded rebel holdouts in Aleppo, the country’s commercial capital. There was also fighting in central city of Homs, Idlib province on the border of Turkey and suburbs near Damascus. The Observatory said several people were killed in the violence, but did not have any figures. Two bombs exploded near the Syrian military’s joint chiefs of staff offices in central Damascus, lightly wounding four army officers and damaging buildings and cars, state television reported. The twin blasts in the posh Abu Rummaneh district were the latest in a wave of bombings to hit Damascus in recent months as clashes between government troops and rebels reached the tightly controlled capital. There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the bombings, which government officials said appeared to target a building under construction near the offices of the joint chiefs of staff. The building, which is officially known as the Guards Battalion and was empty at the time of the blast, serves as a base for army officers who guard the joint chiefs of staff offices some 200 metres away. The government officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because they are not authorised to brief the media, said the wounded were army officers and they had minor injuries. The main opposition Syrian National Council (SNC) has agreed to expand to include more groups opposing Assad and will reform to be more representative, a spokesman said on Sunday. At a meeting in Stockholm late Saturday, the SNC agreed to expand its membership and to hold a vote later this month to elect its leadership, spokesman George Sabra said. “New currents of the opposition will join the SNC. There will be at least five or six new groups from inside and outside Syria” joining the organisation, Sabra said. The group’s general assembly will grow from 300 to 400 members and each opposition group will be represented by 20 members, Sabra said. The mandate of current SNC leader Abdel Basset Sayda, which was due to expire on Sept.9, has been extended and he will stay on until the vote is held in late September, Sabra said. “The composition of the SNC will not be the same, but currents close to the NCC will not be integrated,” said Monzer Makhous, the SNC’s external relations co-ordinator. Footage broadcast on state TV showed a damaged building with debris strewn across the street. The blasts punched a hole in one of the building’s walls, and blew out the windshield and windows of an SUV parked nearby. The twin bombing was the second in recent weeks to hit Abu Rummaneh. On Aug.15, a bomb attached to a fuel truck exploded outside the Dama Rose hotel where UN observers stayed before ending their mission to Syria. That blast, which hit a military compound parking lot, wounded three people. Late Saturday, a car bomb near a Palestinian refugee camp in a suburb of Damascus killed at least 15 people, according to state news agency Sana. It said on Sunday the explosion in the suburb of Al Sbeineh also wounded several people and caused heavy damage to buildings in the area. It blamed the blast on an “armed terrorist group,” the term the regime uses to describe the rebel Free Syrian Army (FSA) seeking to topple Assad.