Syria: Three Officers Killed As Humanitarian Crisis Deepens
Three Syrian officers were killed Tuesday near Damascus, reported state media and the opposition. Meanwhile, a bombing attack left three injured in the center of the Syrian capital, further undermining the cease- fire declared April 12.
The official news agency SANA reported that an “armed terrorist group” killed two army officers Tuesday. A third was killed in the district of Barzeh in Damascus, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR).
The pro-government Ekhbaria television channel claimed that a suicide car bomb went off in a popular shopping district of Damascus, near the old town. The explosion occurred near the Iranian cultural center without causing damages, reported the Fars news agency.
Customs officials have discovered a car full of weapons and ammunition, three machine guns and a grenade launcher at the border with Lebanon, SANA said.
Elsewhere in the country, the UN observers continued their inspection in the province of Homs, a stronghold of the revolt against Bashar Assad.
This mission, which currently has only a dozen people, should include 300 observers, as required by the resolution passed Saturday by the 15 members of the UN Security Council.
Given the scale of the humanitarian crisis in Syria, the World Food Programme (WFP) announced that it wanted to help 500,000 Syrians “in the coming weeks”, which is double the target set for the month of April. The WFP, which is helping hundreds of thousands of Syrians in Homs, Hama, Idlib and Damascus, now intends to “increase food assistance to meet the needs of 250,000 people” and to prepare for increase in the number to half a million “in the coming weeks”.
