Water main hit in Syria, worsening refugee crisis
BEIRUT — Clashes between the Syrian military and rebel fighters burst a main pipe that delivered drinking water to hundreds of thousands of residents of Aleppo, opposition groups said Saturday, as the U.N. refugee agency said more than 1.2 million Syrians still inside the country, half of them children, had been displaced from their homes.
The agency, which has remained active inside Syria throughout the conflict, said the number of people in need of assistance there had doubled since July to 2.5 million, out of Syria’s population of about 21 million. Another 250,000 have fled to refugee camps in neighboring countries.
The sudden water shortage in Aleppo was the latest pinch in a particularly acute humanitarian crisis in Syria’s largest city, brought on by more than a month of street fighting and weeks of air attacks. A witness and two opposition groups that track the violence said Saturday that heavy shelling from Syrian helicopters appeared to have ruptured the water pipe; The Associated Press reported that a Syrian official blamed rebel sabotage.
The opposition groups, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights and the Local Coordination Committees, reported that water flooded into the neighborhoods of Al Midan and Bustan al-Basha in the north of the city. Activists distributed video images of brown water coursing over curbs and flooding basements as residents carrying children or weapons in their arms waded past.
A rebel brigade was trying o cut off food and water to a contingent of soldiers inside the city, said Majed Abdulnoor, an opposition activist interviewed online. He said that a rebel brigade had besieged the Al Mudahami security building in Al Midan, blocking food, water or ammunition from reaching soldiers inside. The shells that cut off the water, Mr. Abdulnoor said, were fired in an attempt to free the building.
After reporting a day earlier that they had captured a military headquarters in the Aleppo neighborhood of Hanano, rebels said Saturday that the battle for the building was still under way, with parts of the sprawling facility still controlled by the government. Opposition groups distributed video of fighters scaling stone walls with rifles across their backs, or moving across a large interior courtyard they said was inside the security building. Another video showed the testimonies of Syrians who said they were among the 350 prisoners the rebels said they rescued from the building the day before.
He also acknowledged the role of some foreign fighters in the assault. A keen focus on foreign fighters has been a hallmark of the government’s characterization of the conflict as a patriotic struggle against interference from abroad, but their presence has also been a flash point for Western worries about itinerant Islamist militants joining what started out as a nonviolent democracy movement.
Most of the fighters in Aleppo are from Aleppo, Mr. Abdulnoor said. But some brigades, he said, include a few Algerians, Egyptians, Tunisians, Palestinians and others from Persian Gulf countries.But he added of the foreign fighters: “Don’t get the false impression that there are thousands of them. ”
Opposition groups and residents said the Syrian military continued its deadly drive to expel the rebels from the Damascus suburbs, shelling their havens for days before soldiers and civilian militiamen, known as shabiha, searched house by house for the holdouts.