Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

Turkey Fires Back at Syria a Fourth Day in a Row

BEIRUT, Lebanon — Turkey fired artillery into Syria for a fourth consecutive day on Saturday after another Syrian shell landed on the Turkish side of the increasingly tense border.

The exchanges — and Turkey’s recent warnings to Syria that it would defend itself — have raised fears of a regional conflict. While stray shells and bullets from the Syrian conflict have often landed in Lebanon and Turkey, for the first time a Syrian shell killed five Turkish civilians on Wednesday, prompting Turkey’s response.

Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta, who was in Peru, said the continued exchange of fire was raising concerns that the Syrian conflict would spread, adding that the United States was using diplomatic channels to relay worries about the fighting.

Both Syria and Turkey on Saturday denied that Syria had pulled its forces back six miles from the border to avoid provoking Turkey, as Turkish news media had reported on Friday. A Turkish government official dismissed the reports as unreliable.

Image
A Syrian boy, hurt from the shelling of a refugee center, sat next to a body on Friday at a hospital in the northern city of Aleppo.Credit...Zac Baillie/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Rebel activity heightened along the border area in Syria’s Idlib Province on Saturday. Antigovernment activists said rebels had seized the Syrian village of Khirbet al-Jouz, not far from where the shell landed in a field in the Turkish village of Guvecci, and one activist group said 40 government soldiers, including officers, had been killed in the fighting. Another Turkish official confirmed in an interview that rebels had taken control in the area.

Potential spillover from the Syrian conflict is a concern not only in Turkey but on all of Syria’s borders. Some Lebanese officials believe Syria wants to drag Lebanon into the conflict to reduce international focus on Syria and raise the stakes if the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, falls.

On Saturday, unnamed Lebanese officials told the local news media that Bouthaina Shaaban, a prominent media adviser to Mr. Assad, had been involved in a plot they say was uncovered this summer to stir sectarian violence in Lebanon, suggesting that the Syrian government was more deeply involved than previously alleged. A Lebanese security official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, later made the same charges. It was impossible to immediately confirm the accusations, and Syria made no statements on the matter.

Lebanon had already charged Michel Samaha, a pro-Syrian politician, in the plot, which it said would have loosed a campaign of bombings and assassinations inside Lebanon.

The Lebanese security official said that evidence from tapped phone calls suggested that Ms. Shaaban had worked with Mr. Samaha, who was accused of transporting explosives to Lebanon and plotting explosions aimed at “big crowds” and Sunni politicians who support the Syrian uprising.

Image
In this image taken from video obtained from the Shaam News Network, smoke rose from houses after government shelling in Homs on Friday.Credit...Shaam News Network, via Associated Press

“From the phone records we have, we managed to track a call between Samaha and Bouthaina Shaaban,” the official said. “Both were talking explicitly and clearly about the operation.”

The allegations about Ms. Shaaban were first reported by Lebanon’s MTV channel.

In Latakia, another province bordering Turkey, unusually intense fighting was reported. Latakia, the home province of the Assad family’s Alawite sect, had previously remained relatively calm. Activists said 10 rebels were killed trying to seize a military outpost.

Also in Latakia, activists reported that a high-ranking officer in the elite Republican Guard died of wounds sustained in clashes days earlier. The officer, Col. Ali Khuzam, was considered the right-hand man of Maher al-Assad, the president’s brother and security enforcer, who heads the feared Fourth Division.

Colonel Khuzam’s death was reported by the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a London-based organization that quoted members of its network of sources in Qardaha, the mountain village near Latakia that is the Assad clan’s hometown. The report could not be confirmed. Conflicting reports have circulated of clashes in Qardaha among Alawite families, and the observatory said he sustained his wounds in those clashes.

Continued heavy shelling was reported on Saturday morning by antigovernment activists in the city and province of Homs. Shelling was also reported near Damascus and in the southern province of Dara’a.

Hania Mourtada contributed reporting from Beirut, and Sebnem Arsu from Istanbul.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 16 of the New York edition with the headline: Turkey Fires Back at Syria A Fourth Day In a Row. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT