Battles rage around Syria chemical weapons sites
International inspectors in Syria have visited three of the 20 sites linked to the country\’s chemical weapons programme, as anti-government activist groups claim regime warplanes have hit several cities in their continuing campaign.
The facilities inspected in the past 10 days have been in government-held areas, making them fairly easy to reach, said Michael Luhan, spokesman for the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) on Thursday.
At some point, the 27-member team may have to cross rebel-held territory to reach other sites that need to be inspected. The UN hopes to organise ceasefires between rebels and government forces to ensure safe passage for their teams.As the inspectors go about their work, the violence in Syria\’s now 30-month-old civil war continues, with at least 28 people reported killed in three separate attacks.
A government warplane struck the town of Safira on Thursday, killing at least 16 people, according to the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which obtains its information through a network of activists on the ground. The group did not know what was hit by the strike.
Safira is southeast of the heavily contested city of Aleppo. The military complex near the town is believed to include an underground facility for chemical weapons production and storage, said Amy Smithson, a chemical weapons expert at the Center for Nonproliferation Studies, a US-based think-tank.
Amateur video said to show the aftermath of the Safira airstrike was posted online later on Thursday. The video showed men and boys hauling a blanket filled with body parts onto a jeep where another two charred bodies already lay.
"Who is this?" one man can be heard asking. "By God, we don\’t know brother," another responded. The video also showed twisted metal, blood splattered on the floor and smashed concrete in the area of the strike.
The Observatory said six people were killed in another airstrike, near the town of Manbij, also in the area.
In Aleppo, six people were killed by rebel fire, the official Syrian news agency SANA said.
Clashes also broke out between al-Qaeda fighters from a group calling itself the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant and Kurdish rebels in the northern border town of Azaz, the Observatory reported.
Meanwhile, in Beirut on Thursday, scores of Syrians flew to Germany, where they were accepted for temporary resettlement.They were 106 of the 4,000 refugees that Germany has accepted to receive on two-year visas, said Roberta Russo of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.
More than 100,000 people have been killed in the conflict, and the UN refugee agency says about one third of Syria\’s pre-war population of 20.8 million have fled their homes, either to other countries or safer areas within Syria.
Source: Agencies
The Times of Earth ( TOE) founded in 1999, is a multilingual newspaper that is printed and circulated in many countries including some parts of the United States and Canada. It is considered as the largest trusted & respected international multimedia news/financial information source of the world.