Syria steps up assault on rebel forces

BEIRUT -- The Syrian military stepped up its campaign against anti-government rebels yesterday as a deadline for the government to implement a UN-sponsored peace plan approached, while the fractured opposition took a step toward unity with representatives of Syria's Kurdish minority.

In the past two days, President Bashar Assad's troops have increased their use of helicopter gunships in rebel areas near Aleppo, the country's largest city, and outside the city of Idlib in the restive north.

"They fired today inside Idlib governorate with helicopters in the morning and at around 2 p.m.," said Abu Khalid, an anti-government activist in Idlib. "They have taken some of the soldiers out of the center of Idlib, but they are moving against nearby villages."

In Geneva, a spokesman for Kofi Annan, the UN special representative to Syria, said the Syrian government had told Annan's office that troops and armor had been removed from three key cities yesterday: Idlib, Zabadani and the southern city of Daraa.

"They are using tanks, helicopters and heavy weapons in Taftanaz and Killi," villages outside Idlib, said Abu Khalid, who spoke via Skype using an alias that means "Father of Khalid" in Arabic. "Yesterday they killed more than 35 people in Taftanaz."

Shelling reportedly also continued in Homs, a central city of more than 1 million that has seen more than two months of nonstop fighting.

Zabadani, a town near the Lebanese border that was briefly out of government control before the military retook it in February, also was being shelled, according to activists.

The situation appeared to be similar in the Damascus suburb of Douma, which has seen clashes between the military and the Free Syrian Army, the loosely organized and lightly armed army defectors and volunteers who took up arms last year, morphing what began as a peaceful revolution into a lopsided military conflict.