Children killed in Syria bombardment: watchdog

BEIRUT/DAMASCUS: Shelling yesterday targeting the town of Hazzeh east of Damascus killed at least nine people including a number of children, a watchdog said, as the Syrian regime pressed its offensive against rebels.
Warplanes also pounded rebel zones on the outskirts of Damascus and in the northern province of Aleppo, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights added, giving a preliminary death toll of 28 for yesterday.
"At least nine civilians, many of them children, were killed in shelling on the Hazzeh area of Eastern Ghuta," it said.
Observatory director Rami Abdel Rahman told AFP that he was unable to immediately confirm how many children had been killed in the artillery attack, but "at least two of the victims were aged under four years."
Amateur video posted on the Internet by Hazzeh-based activists showed a young man carrying the bloodied body of a young boy away from the site of the attack.
The grisly footage also showed other victims lying in the mud. At least two of the bodies shown in the video were those of children.
According to the Observatory, more than 3,500 children have been killed in Syria since the outbreak in March 2011 of a peaceful uprising that morphed into an insurgency after President Bashar Assad's cracked down hard on dissent.
News of the Hazzeh attack came hours after warplanes bombarded Sfeireh in Aleppo province, as well as Daraya, southwest of Damascus, the monitoring group said.
The Britain-based Observatory, which relies on a network of activists, doctors and lawyers inside Syria, also reported fierce clashes between rebels and the army in Daraya and in the Barzeh district of northern Damascus.
Violence around the capital has been on the rise since the army last July launched an offensive against rebels who had moved into several neighborhoods.
Analysts say the regime is attempting to secure an area of control in a radius of about eight kilometres (five miles) around the city.
Yesterday's violence follows a day in which 95 people — 33 civilians, 39 rebel fighters and 23 soldiers — were killed nationwide, the Observatory said.
The United Nations says that more than 60,000 people have been killed over the past nearly 22 months of the conflict in Syria.

Syria calls peace envoy's mission 'useless'
Official media in Syria renewed attacks on UN and Arab League envoy Lakhdar Brahimi yesterday, calling him biased and saying his peace mission aimed at solving the country's crisis was "useless."
On Wednesday, Brahimi criticised as "one-sided" a proposal by President Bashar Assad to end the crisis, and two days later he met top US and Russian officials and urged "a speedy end to the bloodshed" in the strife-torn country.
"It is clear that Mr Brahimi is now out of the loop for the solution for Syria. He has taken sides, he is not a mediator," wrote the pro-regime daily Al-Watan on yesterday's front page.
"Brahimi is incapable of finding a solution to the Syrian crisis.
"He acknowledged in his last meeting with President Assad (on Dec. 24) that Turkey and Qatar will not stop supporting terrorist groups and that he cannot prevent them from doing so," it wrote.
"Brahimi's mission is useless, just like (his predecessor) Kofi Annan, who resigned when he realized that he had no role to play in a war waged against Syria by several Western capitals," said Al-Watan.
Brahimi was appointed to replace Annan in September 2012, after the former UN secretary general resigned when his own peace plan failed to prevent further fighting between rebels and forces loyal to Assad.
Since the start of the uprising in March 2011, Damascus has labelled those calling for Assad's fall as foreign-backed "terrorists."
Brahimi, who last week criticised a three-step solution announced in a rare speech by Assad, "represents the Turkish, US and Gulf states' position, and is not an objective mediator," said Al-Watan.
After Brahimi told the BBC on Wednesday that Assad's proposal was "more sectarian, more one-sided" than similar initiatives he had made in the past official media in Syria accused him of "flagrant bias."
Assad's plan called for dialogue, but only with groups deemed by the regime to be legitimate.
The proposal was rejected outright by the Syrian opposition — including groups tolerated by the regime — and the West.
FROM: AGENCE FRANCE PRESSE