Beirut, Feb. 19 (AP): Gunmen killed a senior Syrian state prosecutor and a judge in the restive northwest province of Idlib, according to the state news agency.
Syrian military defectors waging an armed struggle against President Bashar al-Assad’s regime control parts of Idlib province, which borders Turkey. It has been one of the regions hardest hit by the government crackdown on an 11-month-old uprising against Assad’s regime.
State news agency Sana said Idlib provincial state prosecutor Nidal Ghazal and Judge Mohammed Ziadeh were killed instantly when the gunmen opened fire on their car.
A day earlier, Sana said gunmen shot dead Jamal al-Bish, member of the city council of the nearby northern city of Aleppo, Syria’s largest. It said he was killed outside the city, a centre of support for Assad that has been relatively quiet since the uprising began.
The Syrian government blames armed “terrorists” for the uprising and says they are carrying out a foreign conspiracy to destabilise the country.
Clashes between military rebels and Syrian forces are growing more frequent and the defectors have managed to take control of small pieces of territory in the north and in central Homs province. The increasing militarisation of the conflict is pushing Syria to the brink of a civil war.
The UN last gave a death toll for the conflict in January, saying 5,400 had been killed in 2011 alone. But hundreds more have been killed since, according to activist groups. The group Local Co-ordination Committees says more than 7,300 have been killed since March of last year.
There is no way to independently verify the numbers, however, as Syria bans almost all foreign journalists and human rights organisations.
In other violence, activists reported that security forces shelled rebel-held areas in the besieged city of Homs.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said forces continued to shell the Homs neighbourhood of Baba Amr, which has been under government attack since February 4. The Observatory, which has activists throughout Syria, said 23 buses full of troops along with military vehicles and ambulances were seen heading from Damascus towards Homs.
