DAMASCUS — Syria said Thursday that it is ready to work with new UN envoy Lakhdar Brahimi and hopes he can pave the way for “national dialogue,” even as fighting raged in both the capital and second city Aleppo. State media hailed the recapture by the army of three Christian neighborhoods in the heart of Aleppo, but clashes between troops and rebel fighters raged in other parts of the city and in the southern belt of Damascus. The rebels captured a string of security posts and the local police headquarters in a town along the Iraqi border, activists claimed. Syria's Deputy Foreign Minister Faisal Muqdad said Damascus would cooperate with Brahimi, the veteran Algerian diplomat named as UN-Arab League envoy to replace former UN chief Kofi Annan after his announcement on Aug. 2 that he was stepping down following the failure to implement his six-point peace plan. “We have informed the United Nations that we accept the appointment of Mr Brahimi,” Muqdad told a Damascus news conference. “We are looking forward to seeing... what ideas he is giving for potential solutions for the problem here,” he added. Artillery and helicopters hammered the Sunni town of Daraya for 24 hours, killing 15 people and wounding 150, before soldiers moved in and raided houses, opposition sources said. About 100 people, including 59 civilians, were killed in violence across the country, according to the opposition Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. Some 200 were killed on Wednesday.
There was little resistance as Assad's forces pushed toward the center of Daraya, on the southwest edge of Damascus. Armed rebels had apparently already left, activists in Damascus said. “They are using mortar bombs to clear each sector. Then they enter it, while moving towards the center,” said Abu Zeid, an activist speaking by phone from an area near Daraya. Fighting raged, meanwhile, in Al-Bukamal, which is located across the border from the Iraqi town of Qaim. The border crossing has been in rebel hands since last month, but wresting control of Al-Bukamal itself from regime troops would expand the opposition foothold along the frontier. The opposition already controls a wide swath of territory along the border with Turkey in the north as well as pockets along the frontier with Jordan to the south and Lebanon to the west, which has proven key in ferrying people and material into and out of the country. Russian media reported that Rustam Gelayev, son of a late Chechen rebel warlord in Russia's Caucasus region, had been killed in Syria, with some saying he had been fighting against Assad. Russia's Kommersant daily, however, cited a relative of Gelayev as saying he had been studying in Syria, had decided to leave due to the violence and was killed on his way to Turkey. In Aleppo, tanks shells crashed into buildings in the rebel-held Saif Al-Dawla district, even as displaced civilians came back to check their houses or pick up abandoned belongings. A man in a dirty T-shirt and tattered sandals, who gave his name as Mohammed, said his home was in the nearby neighborhood of Salaheddine, now back in army hands after days of fighting. The upheaval in Syria, at the heart of a volatile Middle East, is already spilling over into its neighbors. Sporadic clashes between Sunnis and Alawites erupted for a fourth day in Lebanon's northern city of Tripoli, breaching a truce agreed less than 24 hours earlier, after Sunni gunmen shot dead an Alawite man. Nine people were wounded in the fighting. — Agencies
