February 21, 2013 - MIDDLE EAST - A car bombing near Syria's ruling party headquarters in Damascus killed 53 people on Thursday, according to state media, while mortar rounds exploded near the army's central command in the city. It was the third straight day of attacks on the center of the capital, among the deepest and fiercest on the heart of Bashar Assad's seat of power during the civil war. The car bombing was the deadliest attack inside Damascus in nine months and within hours, two other bombings and a mortar attack on the military compound followed.
Syria Says 53 Killed In Damascus Car Bomb.
While no one group has claimed responsibility, the attacks suggest that rebel fighters who have gotten bogged down in their attempts to storm the capital are resorting to guerrilla tactics to loosen Assad's grip on the capital. The day's deadliest attack struck a main street on the edge of central Mazraa neighborhood, near the headquarters of Assad's Baath party and the Russian Embassy, as well as a mosque, a hospital and a school. TV footage of the blast site showed firemen dousing a flaming car with hoses and lifeless and dismembered bodies blown into the grass of a nearby park. The state news service, SANA, published photos showing a large crater in the middle of the rubble-strewn street and charred cars holding blackened bodies. Witnesses at the scene said a car exploded at a security checkpoint between the Russian Embassy and the central headquarters of Assad's ruling party. "It was huge. Everything in the shop turned upside down," one local resident said. He said three of his employees were injured by flying glass that killed a young girl who was walking by when the blast hit. "I pulled her inside the shop but she was almost gone. We couldn't save her. She was hit in the stomach and head," he said, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution for speaking with foreign media. Ambulances rushed to the scene of the blast, which shattered windows and sent up a huge cloud of smoke visible throughout much of the city, witnesses said. State TV called it a "terrorist" attack by a suicide bomber. It said at least 53 people were killed and more than 200 wounded.
The Britain-based activist group the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said at least 42 people were killed, most of them civilians. Some members of the Syrian security forces were also killed, it said. There was no way to immediately reconcile the differing death tolls. The bombing appeared to be the second most deadly in the Syrian capital since the uprising against Assad began 23 months ago. Fifty-five people were killed in the first, a double suicide bombing outside of an intelligence building in May, 2012. The most extreme of Syria's rebel groups, Jabhat al-Nusra, claimed responsibility for that and other bombings that have struck targets associated with the regime but also killed civilians. Such tactics have galvanized Assad's supporters and made many other Syrians distrustful of the rebel movement as a whole, most of whose fighting groups do not use such tactics. There was no immediate claim of responsibility for Thursday's attack. Russia's state owned RIA Novosti news agency quoted a Russian Embassy official as saying the Embassy building had been damaged in the blast but no one was hurt. Among those wounded by flying glass was Nayef Hawatmeh, the leader of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a radical Damascus-based Palestinian group. An official at his office, about 500 yards from the site of the explosion, said Hawatmeh was wounded in the hands and face from flying glass. He was taken to hospital and later released. In a separate attack, Syrian state TV said mortar shells exploded near the Syrian Army General Command in central Damascus, causing no casualties. The station said the building was empty because it was under renovation. The Britain-based activist group Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said two mortar rounds struck near the building but did not report casualties. On Wednesday, two mortar shells exploded next to a soccer stadium in Damascus, killing one player. The day before, two mortar shells blew up near one of Assad's three palaces in the city, causing only material damage. -
Business Week.
WATCH: Deadly bomb blast damages Russian embassy in Damascus.
Russia Warns Syria Rivals Risk 'Mutual Destruction'.
Russia urged Wednesday the regime and rebels in Syria to swiftly halt their almost two-year conflict, warning that seeking a military settlement risked leading to mutual destruction. "It's time to end this two-year conflict," Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said after a meeting with Arab League chief Nabil al-Arabi and other top Arab diplomats. "Neither side can allow itself to bet on a military settlement as this is a path to nowhere, a path to the mutual destruction." -
Daily Star.
Syria Claims To Down Israeli Drone Over Lebanon.
Syrian air defenses reportedly shot down an Israeli drone near the Syrian-Lebanese border, a Syrian news site reported Wednesday evening. Eyewitnesses were quoted by Damas Post saying they saw burning wreckage fall from the sky over the village of Yanta in eastern Lebanon, causing no damage. The event was not reported on Syria’s official news agency SANA. There was no immediate Israeli comment.
 |
An Israeli drone (Photo credit: Abed Rahim Khatib/Flash 90). |
A resident of Deir al-Ashayer posted on a local Facebook group shortly thereafter that he saw a surface to air missile fired from Syria, and that the aircraft crashed on the Lebanese side of the border. Earlier in the day the Lebanese government news agency reported Israeli warplanes conducting multiple overflights and “mock raids” over southern Lebanon. The Deir Al-Ashayer area is about 15 miles west of Damascus and not far from the site of a reported Israeli strike on a Syrian arms convoy near a research site last month. -
Times of Israel.
WATCH: Hezbollah vs FSA - 'Bloodbath Looms In Lebanon As Syria War Spills Over'.
Israeli Scientists Create ‘Stealthy Fiber Optic Communications’.
Two Israeli university professors and a PhD candidate have created a concept for “stealthy fiber optic communications.” Developed by Ben Gurion University of the Negev’s Prof. Dan Sadot and Prof. Ze’ev Zalevsky of Bar Ilan University together with PhD student Tomer Yeminy, the new encryption method enables stealthy transmission of any optical communications signal. Currently in the patenting process, the new encryption method spreads the transmission below the noise level in both time and frequency domains. Because it uses sampling accompanied by temporal and spectral phase encryption, an eavesdropper trying to detect the transmitted signal catches only noise, since the signal is hidden below the noise level. “It is analogous to many soft sounds of a lovely symphony scattered through a recording of background noise,” said the researchers. “The authorized user who knows the spreading key is the only one able to detect and enjoy the symphony without the noisy background. “It should be noted that analysis shows that it will take [an exponential number of] years for an eavesdropper to break the encryption key – which means that eavesdropping is very hard,” they added. “This method could also be useful in improving the immunity of the fiber optic communications system to jamming,” the researchers pointed out. -
Israel National News.
Clashes Erupt As Israel Destroys Electricity Pylons.
The Israeli military has removed and destroyed 30 electricity pylons key to the supply of power to a large part of the village of Qusrah, 24km south of the city of Nablus, under the pretext that those pylons were ‘disturbing’ residents of the Israeli colonial outpost of Yesh Qodesh. Furious villagers clashed with Israeli forces on Wednesday evening and yesterday after they stormed the village and removed the pylons. The Israeli forces used tear gas and rubber-coated bullets to disperse the Palestinian demonstrators. As a result eight villagers were admitted to hospital with light to moderate injuries. Approximately 400,000 Israelis live in colonies in the occupied West Bank. The colonies, deemed illegal under international law, have been built on occupied land, forcing Palestinian villages to be moved elsewhere.
Speaking to Gulf News Gassan Doghlous, a Palestinian National Authority (PNA) official, said that the pylons had never posed a threat to the Israeli outpost. “It is true that those [pylons] face the outpost but they are far away from the outpost, which itself was illegally built on privately-owned Palestinian territory,” he said. He added that a large part of the village had been left in the dark and that the village’s council had lodged a complaint with the Palestinian-Israeli security liaison office, which is yet to respond. “We know that the security coordination office will not do anything about the brutal actions of the Israeli military and colonists, but it was a necessary official procedure,” he said. “There has been no legal justification for destroying the pylons, [an action] which initiated the clashes and left hundreds of villagers in total darkness,” he said. Doghlous said that the village of Qusrah is located in Area B, an area making up one-fifth of the West Bank, in which the PNA has administrative control while Israel has security control. “The Israeli military [did not] coordinate its military action in Qusrah and never informed the Palestinian side about Israeli intentions to destroy the [pylons],” he said, adding that such acts were not acceptable and strictly violate the agreements between the Israelis and the Palestinians.
As per the Oslo Accords, Israel is obliged to notify the PNA before holding security exercises in areas jointly controlled by the two. The villagers also reported the damage caused by the Israeli forces to the PNA and the Nablus Governorate, which promised urgent and immediate action to restore power to affected homes. The village, with a total population of 4,500 Palestinians, had been a key target for Israeli colonists, whose colonies and outposts spread in the area and on lands owned primarily by Qusrah residents. Abdul Azim Al Wadi, who heads the Qusrah Village Council, said that Israeli colonists, escorted by Israeli forces, had become accustomed to raiding the village and destroying public and private property. “In the past couple of years, the Israeli military and colonists have committed all kinds of violations against the villagers of Qusrah. [There have been] daily clashes with colonists who have bad intentions towards the villagers,” he told Gulf News. Al Wadi highlighted the PNA’s failure to minimise colonists’ attacks on the village. “The PNA should play an active role in providing the villagers with protection. We know for sure that the colonists aim at removing the villagers from the area, and those goals should be confronted officially and publicly,” he said. “The residents of Qusrah should be provided with a helping hand and never be left as prey for the Israeli colonists whose greed is unlimited,” he said. -
Gulf News.
 |
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad speaks at Azadi Square (Freedom Square) for the celebration of the 34th anniversary of the Islamic Revolution in Tehran, Iran on February 10, 2013. Ahmadinejad told the crowd that Iranian nation is as strong as it could be and no one can impose their will on the Iranian nation. He also added "Today, enemies are making every effort to stop the progress of the Iranian nation by increasing pressure, but they have not been successful." UPI/Maryam Rahmanian. License Photo. |
6 World Powers "Offer Iran Serious Plan" Nuclear Weapons.
Six world powers plan to make a "serious offer" to Iran during talks on resolving disputes about its nuclear energy program, a Western diplomat said. The offer, to be made in Kazakhstan Tuesday, is expected to have what the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council and Germany -- known as the P5-plus-1 -- consider "significant new elements," the diplomat told reporters in London on condition of anonymity. "We will take an offer with us which we believe to be a substantial and serious offer," the diplomat said, offering no details. CNN cited Western officials as saying the delegates plan to offer eased sanctions currently preventing trade with Iran in gold and other precious metals, if Iran shuts down its underground Fordo uranium-enrichment plant south of Tehran, near the holy city of Qom. The delegates would also say Iran must get rid of its stockpile of uranium enriched to 20 percent purity, the officials said. Twenty-percent enrichment puts Iran a few technical steps away from weapons-grade uranium. Iran has been stockpiling enriched uranium for years in defiance of Security Council resolutions demanding a halt to the activity. Iran already rejected the new P5-plus-1 proposal, CNN said. But officials told the network they believed Iran's crumbling economy, due to Western sanctions, may cause the regime to consider making a deal. The network described the new offer as a slightly revised version of a package P5-plus-1 delegates presented to Iran during talks in Moscow, Baghdad and Istanbul, Turkey, last year. During those talks Britain, China, France, Russia, the United States and Germany proposed offering fuel for a medical reactor and eased sanctions so Tehran could buy spare parts for its civil aircraft, if the regime suspended its uranium enrichment and shipped its stockpiles out of the country. "We couldn't come back with the same proposal," one official told the network. "But the idea is to test the waters and see where the Iranians are and if they are serious," the official said. "We hope to get some insight into their thinking and see what they prioritize in their asks and offers." Iran insists it is legally entitled to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes and denies it wants to become a nuclear weapons state. By contrast, the International Atomic Energy Agency says it can no longer verify Iran's nuclear program is strictly peaceful. Washington and European allies have imposed increasingly onerous sanctions on the country in response to the enrichment program. Israel has warned it may carry out military strikes to stop Iran from gaining nuclear-weapons capacity. Washington says it won't rule out using force but prefers diplomacy. -
UPI.