West slams Syrian regime over barrel bombings of Daraya

Beirut/ AFP

Western powers lashed out at Syria’s government, accusing regime forces of dropping barrel bombs on the town of Daraya hours after it received its first food aid in almost four years.
The strikes, using crude unguided explosive devices, came as Arab-Kurdish fighters said they had encircled a stronghold of IS fighters in northern Syria, cutting off a major supply route. French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault accused Damascus of “extraordinary duplicity” over the bombings, which came just as aid workers were beginning to distribute supplies to thousands of desperate people.
Ayrault said he was “outraged beyond words”, declaring the end of an already shaky ceasefire and calling world powers to meet.
A convoy of trucks carrying food arrived in Daraya late Thursday, delivering rice, lentils, sugar, oil and wheat flour to civilians for the first time since the regime laid siege to the town in late 2012.
Assad’s forces bombarded the town shortly after, according to a witness and human rights monitors, dropping indiscriminate barrel bombs from helicopters as residents shared food. Local council member Shadi Matar said aid had not yet been distributed “because of the intensity of the raids”.
US State Department spokesman Mark Toner said “such attacks are unacceptable in any circumstance, but in this case they also hampered the delivery and distribution of badly needed assistance”.
Nearly 600,000 people live in besieged areas in Syria, most surrounded by government forces, and another four million in hard-to-reach areas, according to the United Nations. UN-backed peace talks on ending the war stalled in April when the opposition walked out over lack of humanitarian access.
Aid agencies said supplies reached Douma on Friday—the first UN delivery since autumn 2013, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based monitoring group. The Syrian Arab Red Crescent said 39 trucks took food and non-food items including medicines into the besieged town.
But the UN’s humanitarian agency was still awaiting Damascus’s approval to deliver aid to two more of Syria’s besieged areas: Al-Waer in Homs province and Zabadani in rural Damascus.

‘No way out’
Elsewhere, Arab-Kurdish fighters backed by the United States cut IS’s main supply route between Syria and Turkey, in a major setback for the extremists. IS lost control of a vital supply artery when the troops completely surrounded the town of Manbij, at the heart of the last stretch of territory along Turkey’s border still under the extremists’ control.
IS has come under growing pressure on various fronts in Syria and Iraq, where it established its self-declared “caliphate” in 2014.
“The Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) cut off the last road from Manbij to the Turkish border,” said the Observatory.
The US envoy to the anti-IS coalition backing the SDF, Brett McGurk, said the move had severed an important route for IS fighters looking to attack Europe.
“IS terrorists now completely surrounded with no way out,” he wrote on Twitter. “Manbij is where we believe the Paris attackers, the Brussels attackers, they all kind of pulsed through this area,” McGurk said. “From Raqa up to Manbij and then out to the capitals where they had organised their attack.” About 20,000 people are still living in the town, which had a pre-war population of about 120,000—mostly Arabs, but about a quarter Syrian Kurds.
This week the SDF, backed by coalition air strikes, cut the road north out of Manbij to the IS-held border town of Jarabulus, which the jihadists had used as a transit point for fighters, money and weapons.

Bombers kill 8 outside shrine near Damascus

Damascus / AFP

A double bomb attack outside a Shiite shrine near Syria’s capital killed at least eight people on Saturday, in the latest in repeated deadly strikes on the revered site, state media said.
The official SANA news agency said a suicide bomber and a car bomb struck at the entrance to the Sayyida Zeinab shrine, which is revered by Shiites around the world. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a British-based monitoring group, reported a higher toll of at least 12 people killed and 30 wounded in the blasts.
The shrine, around 10 kilometres south of the centre of Damascus, is heavily guarded by pro-government forces but has still been the target of several extremist attacks, including those claimed by the IS group.
Syria’s official Al-Ikhbariya channel showed images from the scene of burned-out cars billowing with plumes of black smoke.
Firefighters battled to extinguish the flames as shop signs lay in the street.
The last attack on Sayyida Zeinab on April 25 killed at least seven and wounded dozens.
A string of IS bombings near the shrine in February left 134 people dead, most of them civilians, according to the Observatory.
And in January, another attack claimed by IS killed 70 people.
Lebanese Shiite militant group Hezbollah cited the threat to Sayyida Zeinab as a principal reason for its intervention in Syria’s civil war on the side of President Bashar Al Assad.