Elderly Syrian man saved from sniper (VIDEO)

Attacks interminably in Syria

Syrian forces have launched new air strikes and shelled rebel strongholds in several key cities, particularly in and around the key northern commercial hub of Aleppo.

Warplanes on Saturday bombed the town of Azaz near Aleppo and shelling continued in the city's neighbourhoods of al-Fardos, al-Sukkari, Bustan al-Zahra and Kallasa.

Fighting between government forces and rebels was also reported near Saad al-Allah al-Jabri's Square in Aleppo's centre and in the southern rebel stronghold of Salaheddin. Aleppo has become a main focus of the conflict since late July.

State television said soldiers "cleared terrorists and mercenaries" from the western district of Saif al-Sawla on Saturday.



In Damascus, fighting broke out in the heavily populated southern district of Tadamon, showing that the rebels still have pockets of resistance in the capital despite government forces last month claiming they had retaken it.

Meanwhile, in the eastern province of Deir al-Zor, activists said shelling by government forces continued on the city of Abu Kamal and the towns of Abou Hamman and al-Kashkiyya, and that armoured vehicles were seen moving into the eastern town of Mayadeen.

Government forces also pounded rebel-held areas of the central city of Homs and the southern city of Herak, activists said.

'Determination' required

Government forces appear to be resorting to more attacks from the air against the more poorly armed rebel groups, while accounts of people being shot dead by snipers are increasing.

The violence come as the UN said veteran Algerian diplomat Lakhdar Brahimi would take over as international envoy from Kofi Annan, who quit this month after the failure of his peace plan.

Brahimi said the task of finding a solution to end the 17-month-old conflict, which activists say has killed 23,000 people, required "a lot of determination".

His appointment was announced the day after the UN called time on its observer mission in Syria amid the escalating violence.

UN observers will depart from Syria on Sunday, but will leave behind a "liaison office" in Damascus, though its size and role have not been finalised, a UN spokesperson said.

The conflict in Syria has created an increasingly precarious humanitarian situation, triggering a major exodus of refugees that the UN said on Friday had risen to least 170,000, many of them fleeing to Turkey.

Defection rumours

Laurent Fabius, the French foreign minister, on Friday called for President Bashar al-Assad's regime to be "smashed fast" as he visited the largest of the refugee camps in Turkey.

"After hearing the refugees and their account of the massacres of the regime, Mr Bashar al-Assad doesn't deserve to be on this earth," Fabius said.


Assad's regime has faced a string of high-level defections, including Prime Minister Riad Hijab and senior general Manaf Tlass. A bomb attack also killed four top security chiefs.

On Friday, reports emerged of the defection of Farouq al-Sharaa, Syria's vice president, a claim Syrian state media denied.

Citing a statement from his office, Syrian TV said on Saturday: "Mr Sharaa has never thought about leaving the country or going anywhere." Sharaa himself was not seen.

The rebel Free Syrian Army said in a statement that Sharaa, 73, who has been vice president since 2006, had tried to defect to the opposition.

"Initial reports show that there was an attempted defection, but that it failed," the FSA's military council said.

Sharaa is the most powerful Sunni Muslim figure in the minority Alawite-led regime and has served in top posts for
almost 30 years.

Lebanon kidnappings

Meanwhile, in neighbouring Lebanon, three Syrians who had been kidnapped by armed gunmen in the capital Beirut on Saturday were released, the state NNA news agency reported.

The abductions come days after the Meqdad clan kidnapped 20 Syrians in Lebanon in retaliation against what they say was the abduction of one of their family members by a Syrian rebel group last week.

Two Turks have also been abducted, at least one of them by the Meqdad clan.

The wave of kidnapping has ratcheted up tensions in Lebanon and caused several Gulf countries to tell their nationals to leave. The United States and Turkey have also warned their nationals against all but essential travel to the country.

Al Jazeera

The latest revelation of Assange and Wikileaks: secret Syrian files

Based on Wikileaks Assange would reveal documents about the situation in Syria. From embassy of Ecuador, on 5 July 2012, Assange and his contributors would publish Syria files from " 678,752 different email addresses that have sent emails and 1,082,447 different recipients", Wikileaks said.

Read the Wikileaks announcement:

Today, Thursday 5 July 2012, WikiLeaks began publishing the Syria Files – more than two million emails from Syrian political figures, ministries and associated companies, dating from August 2006 to March 2012.

This extraordinary data set derives from 680 Syria-related entities or domain names, including those of the Ministries of Presidential Affairs, Foreign Affairs, Finance, Information, Transport and Culture.

Over the next two months, ground-breaking stories derived from the files will appear in WikiLeaks (global), Al Akhbar (Lebanon), Al Masry Al Youm (Egypt), ARD (Germany), Associated Press (US), L’Espresso (Italy), Owni (France) and Publico.es (Spain). Other publications will announce themselves closer to their publishing date.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said: "The material is embarrassing to Syria, but it is also embarrassing to Syria’s opponents. It helps us not merely to criticise one group or another, but to understand their interests, actions and thoughts. It is only through understanding this conflict that we can hope to resolve it."

At this time Syria is undergoing a violent internal conflict that has killed between 6,000 and 15,000 people in the last 18 months. The Syria Files shine a light on the inner workings of the Syrian government and economy, but they also reveal how the West and Western companies say one thing and do another.

The range of information extends from the intimate correspondence of the most senior Baath party figures to records of financial transfers sent from Syrian ministries to other nations.

The database comprises 2,434,899 emails from the 680 domains. There are 678,752 different email addresses that have sent emails and 1,082,447 different recipients. There are a number of different languages in the set, including around 400,000 emails in Arabic and 68,000 emails in Russian. The data is more than eight times the size of ’Cablegate’ in terms of number of documents, and more than 100 times the size in terms of data. Around 42,000 emails were infected with viruses or trojans. To solve these complexities, WikiLeaks built a general-purpose, multi-language political data-mining system which can handle massive data sets like those represented by the Syria Files.

In such a large collection of information, it is not possible to verify every single email at once; however, WikiLeaks and its co-publishers have done so for all initial stories to be published. We are statistically confident that the vast majority of the data are what they purport to be.