Thirty-six hours after Israel’s airstrikes on military targets near Damascus, the thunder claps of an army artillery barrage rolled across the capital from all directions.
“It always sounds like this when they are hitting Daraya,” says my friend Nabil, a businessman whose office is located in the diplomatic quarter of Abu Rammaneh.
Daraya, to the southwest, has been a major battlefield over the past eight months. When the sound of shells and bombs came from another direction, he says, “they are also hitting Qaboun and Jobar”, to the east.
Nabil has heard reports that the army has adapted its tactics to guerrilla warfare and retrained troops, and is doing better in the field in the past few months. “They are more organised and more motivated,” he says. The army, largely made up of conscripts, may also be more motivated because of the substantial presence among the rebels of radical jihadis who take no prisoners.
Yesterday it seemed to be hitting the rebels hard after the foreign ministry said Israel was colluding with the opposition.
'
Declaration of war'
The Syrian government, which has called Israel's airstrikes a "declaration of war", has confirmed that the facilities struck in the raid were military camps and a scientific research station in the Jamraya area just north of Damascus. A military airport at Dimas and an unidentified facility at Maysaloon, the site of a historic battle between French and Syrian forces in 1920, not far from the Lebanese border, were also hit.
The government has not announced the death toll but opposition activists say 42 soldiers were killed.
A Syrian airforce officer told Russia Today that Israel had used "depleted uranium shells", bunker busters employed by the US and UK in Iraq in 1991 and 2003.
“There was no valuable equipment at the [scientific] site,” he said. “It was all removed after a previous attack on the facility. The military losses from this are negligible.”
Nabil, who lives near Jamraya, heard the initial earth-shaking blasts from Israeli rockets and bombs. These were followed by “small explosions for about three hours”, he says, indicating that ammunition was hit. In addition to the scientific compound and the army camps, the Israelis took out a commercial chicken farm that provides income for the military.
Syrian officials have denied Israel targeted advanced missiles bound for the Lebanese Hizbullah movement.
Iranian general Masoud Jazayeri also rejects claims that an Iranian weapons cache had been destroyed by Israel.
While the EU expressed “great concern” over the Israeli raid, Russian foreign ministry spokesman Alexander Lukashevich said Moscow was “seriously concerned by signs of preparation of global public opinion for possible [western] military intervention” and called on the West to stop politicising claims of the use of chemical weapons.
His comment coincided with a statement to Swiss television by former war crimes prosecutor Carla Del Ponte who said a four-member UN commission of inquiry to which she belongs has "strong suspicions" that rebel forces used sarin gas but no evidence of government use. The mission, which interviewed injured refugees from the conflict, based its conclusions on the treatment given to victims.
However, the UN commission investigating human rights abuses issued a statement saying no “conclusive findings” had been reached on the deployment of chemical weapons in Syria “by any parties to the conflict”.
Rebel Free Syrian army chief Selim Idriss has rejected claims by Ms Del Ponte that it may have used chemical weapons in the conflict. He called her statements a "huge injustice" and "provocation" to the Syrian people. He could not, however, speak for all militias loosely connected with the Free Army or for independent jihadis.
Seminar
The opposition Syrian National Coalition said it would hold a seminar on the use of chemical weapons today in Istanbul where the speakers will include a lawyer, a doctor and Adnan Sillo, an army defector who had headed a Syria chemical warfare unit.
"The Syrian regime has used the chemical weapons against civilians many times," Maj Gen Sillo told the New York Times .
