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Battle intensifies for Syria's 2nd city

Dozens killed; Turkey closes border as UN cuts peace troops by half

AFP, Damascus
The Syrian army and rebels sent reinforcements to Aleppo yesterday to join the intensifying battle for the country's second city, as the United Nations pulled out half of its troubled observer mission.
UN peacekeeping chief Herve Ladsous said he had told Syrian officials that without a significant reduction in violence, the remaining 150 observers would leave on the expiry of the "final" 30-day extension of the mission's mandate agreed by the Security Council on July 20.
Helicopter gunships strafed several neighbourhoods of the commercial capital, causing deaths and injuries, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
Clashes raged in Aleppo’s central Al-Jamaliya neighbourhood, near the local headquarters of the ruling Baath party. In Kalasseh in the south, rebels set fire to a police
station, the Observatory said.
War planes overflew the city, breaking the sound barrier but not opening fire, Observatory director Rami Abdel Rahman told AFP.
He also said the rebels "are sending numerous fighters to Aleppo to battle the regime because, for them, Aleppo is as important as Benghazi was for the Libyan rebels."
"Aleppo is the capital of the north and the northern regions are already in their hands so, if this city falls, the regime is over and the two sides know it."
A rebel spokesman told AFP via Skype that a "large number" of troops have been moved from the northwestern province of Idlib to Aleppo.
Free Syrian Army Colonel Abdel Jabbar al-Oqaidi said he believed the reinforcements were being sent because of the intensity of clashes in Aleppo, where several districts were "liberated" on Monday.
A Syrian newspaper journalist confirmed the rebels were also reinforcing.
"Hundreds of rebels from all over the north of Syria are arriving in Aleppo, which appears to have become the decisive battle," the journalist told AFP.
The Britain-based Observatory also reported clashes in the Al-Hajar Al-Aswad district of Damascus, one of the last remaining rebel bastions after 10 days of fighting there.
Nationwide at least 45 people were killed yesterday, most of them civilians, after 158 people died on Tuesday, the watchdog said.
In Hama province in central Syria, a couple and their two children were killed as they tried to flee shelling. A video distributed by the
Observatory showed grisly footage of the bodies.
Two Syrian brigadier generals entered Turkey on Tuesday, bringing to 27 the number of generals who have fled the unrest, a foreign ministry official told AFP.
And Syria confirmed that the head of its mission in Cyprus, Lamia al-Hariri, had also defected.
Rights group Amnesty International, meanwhile, yesterday warned about disturbing reports of "summary executions" by both Syrian troops and rebels, calling them "serious violations of international law."
Turkey said it was closing its border crossings with Syria until further notice after rebels seized two frontier posts.
"We have taken such a measure for our citizens for security reasons," a Turkish official told AFP. "This is an open-ended measure and the reopening depends on the developments on the ground."