]BEIRUT (Reuters) – The Syrian army fired rockets at a district of Damascus yesterday to try to drive out insurgents fighting their way closer to the seat of President Bashar al-Assad’s power.
As a conflict that has killed 60,000 people in 21 months shows no sign of abating, Syria’s deputy foreign minister visited Iran, seeking to maintain the support of Assad’s main ally in the region.
Iran’s Fars news agency said Faisal al-Makdad would meet President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and other Iranian officials.
Syrian state media said Assad would give a speech this morning about “developments in Syria and the region”, his first major public comments on the uprising since he told Russian television in November that foreign intervention would be a disaster for the Middle East, and vowed never to flee into exile.
Since then, rebels have brought the fight closer to the capital. Yesterday government forces fired rockets at Jobar, a Sunni enclave close to the centre of Damascus, said Housam, an activist in the city. On Friday they had bombarded Daraya, a suburb in the east that is part of a crescent of rebel-held areas on the outskirts of the city.
“The shelling began in the early hours of the morning, it has intensified since 11 am, and now it has become really heavy. Yesterday it was Daraya and today Jobar is the hottest spot in Damascus,” Housam said by Skype.
Western countries have so far shown no appetite for military engagement in Syria of the sort that helped oust Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, but NATO is sending US and European Patriot surface-to-air missile batteries to the Turkish-Syrian border.
The United States military said US troops and equipment had begun arriving in Turkey on Friday for the deployment. Germany and the Netherlands are also sending Patriot batteries, which will take weeks to deploy fully.
