Dozens Killed in Air Strike at Bustling Market in Aleppo
The New York Times reports that dozens of civilians were killed by an air strike in the Hellok neighborhood in northeast Aleppo, one of the grisliest bombings there since the December 2013 start of the government’s barrel bomb offensive on the former financial hub.
“News photographs and videos of the aftermath posted on the Internet by monitoring groups were extreme even by the gruesome standards that have come to define the visual depictions of the three-year-old civil war in Syria,” the paper says.
“Youths were seen carrying the remains of people who presumably just moments earlier had been shopping for vegetables and fuel. One rescuer held a shredded lower limb and folded it into a pair of jeans.”
The attack came a day after a barrel bomb dropped on an elementary school in another part of the city, killing at least 20, including 17 children.
U.N. Looking for Syria Envoy as Brahimi Prepares to Quit After Failed Peace Talks
The Guardian reports that “urgent efforts” are under way to find a replacement for the U,N.’s special envoy on Syria, the veteran Algerian diplomat Lakhdar Brahimi, who will likely resign by the end of May. Brahimi, 80, is expected to brief the U.N. Security Council on May 13, which many expect will be his last appearance in the post.
“After the failure of the Geneva peace talks and President Bashar al-Assad’s confident decision to stand for re-election, Kevin Rudd, the former Australian Labour prime minister, and Michael Williams, a British veteran of the U.N. and now a peer, have emerged as leading candidates for the most important – and probably the most thankless – role in world diplomacy, which is in effect paralyzed in the fourth bloody year of the Syrian crisis,” the Guardian writes.
“Diplomatic sources confirmed on Thursday that the other names on the U.N. shortlist are Kamel Morjane, a former Tunisian foreign minister, and Javier Solana, the Spanish politician who has been both Nato secretary-general and the European Union’s foreign policy supremo.”
Syria Sees a Resurgence of Suicide Bombers
Reuters reports on the resurgence of suicide attacks in Syria and in neighboring Iraq, mostly by foreign extremists. “Shortly before Abdul Waheed Majeed, a 41-year-old British truck driver, blew himself up in an attack on a Syrian prison, he brushed aside a question in Arabic. ‘I’m sorry, I can’t speak it,’ he said in a video. ‘My tongue bro’… it’s got like a knot in it.’”
That February 6 attack by the Pakistani-born Majeed “appeared to be part of a resurgence of such attacks that represented a disturbing shift in tactics among radical jihadists in the sectarian killing grounds of Syria and Iraq. Many of them have been carried out by foreigners drawn to the conflicts from across the region and from Europe, U.S. and European security and intelligence officials say.
“With Assad using his full firepower against rebels who lack sophisticated arms, the military balance tipped against the rebels last year, driving foreign fighters to carry out suicide attacks to make up for losses on the battleground.”
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LA Times: Syria’s Assad Among 24 Registered as Presidential Hopefuls