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-Syria Daily: Regime Bombards Darayya as 100+ Killed

Across Country

Syria’s military stepped up its weeks-long bombardment of Darayya on Wednesday, dropping

more than 20 bombs on the Damascus suburb.

Sources reports that 10 more bombs have fallen today, with residents saying that the

shattering effects of the bombardment are like “an ongoing earthquake”.

Regime forces have been trying to take control of the area — connected a vital link between

south Damascus and the surrounding province of West Ghouta — but have been unable to

mount a successful ground offensive to break the months-long presence of the insurgency.

If insurgents can consolidate their position, they threaten to cut out a regime route to Daraa

Province in southern Syria.

- Syria Daily: Geneva II — “No Result Expected from

Talks”

United Nations envoy Lakhdar Brahimi (pictured) said, after Wednesday’s indirect talks, that he expects no significant outcome from the Geneva II conference on Syria.

Brahimi said “the gap between” the Assad and opposition delegations “is quite large”. He expressed hope that the next round of talks would be more productive.

The envoy said a date for the next round will be announced when the current discussions end on Friday.

The opposition had said that it saw progress, with the regime delegation agreeing to consideration of the political transition.

However, the Assad representatives said that they would only consider the Geneva I communique — which the opposition and its foreign supporters say

requires the departure of the President — “paragraph by paragraph”.

- Syria: Geneva II Offers Opportunity to Question Assad’s

Officials

The Geneva II conference on Syria is as much a propaganda contest as it is a stage for political discussions. That has given critics of the Assad regime a rare opportunity to challenge Damascus’ officials. Anne Barnard and Hwaida Saad report for The New York Times:

For Syrian officials, a lakeside idyll here, far from their country’s war, has been marred by what plainly feels to them like an endless stream of impertinent questions.

They have been asked why their government is bombing its citizens, when their president is leaving office, what happened to a British doctor who died suspiciously in a Syrian government prison. They have even been offered the coordinates of jihadist

fighters — and asked if they will drop bombs on them instead of on civilians.

-The questions that gall them the most, judging by their reactions, are not from the foreigners whose queries they are accustomed to viewing as part of a “media war.” The ones that really nettle them come from Syrians.

Human Rights Watch on Thursday accused Syria’s regime of deliberately demolishing thousands of civilians homes in Hama and Damascus in 2012 and 2013, in operations that violated the laws of war.

In a new report, Razed to the Ground: Syria’s

Unlawful Neighborhood Demolitions in 2012-2013, HRW have used satellite imagery, witness statements, and video and photographic evidence to document seven cases of large-scale demolitions. According to HRW’s research, the demolitions “either served no necessary military purpose and appeared to intentionally punish the civilian population or caused disproportionate harm to civilians”.

The seven cases documented occurred between July 2012-July 2013 in the Masha` al-Arb`een and Wadi al-Jouz neighborhoods in Hama, and the Qaboun, Tadamoun, Barzeh, Mezzeh military airport, and Harran Al-`Awamid neighborhoods in and near Damascus. All of the affected neighborhoods were widely considered by the authorities and by witnesses interviewed by HRW to be strongholds of the opposition.

Reuters

-U.S. denies it sought direct negotiations with Syria in

Geneva

(Reuters) - Washington denied claims by Syria's foreign minister on Saturday that American diplomats had sought to negotiate directly with their Syrian counterparts at last week's 'Geneva 2' peace conference in Switzerland.

State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said the United States had offered to connect with Syrian

officials "on a staff level" through the United Nations and Joint Special Representative Lakhdar Brahimi.

"At no point did the United States offer to negotiate directly with the Syrian regime," she said, adding that the United States had made similar offers throughout the conflict.

Psaki was responding to a query from Reuters after Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Moualem said the Americans had requested direct negotiations in Montreux, the Swiss city where talks began on January 22 before moving to Geneva.

"We refused to do so before Secretary of State John Kerry apologizes for what he said at the conference," Moualem told reporters aboard the Syrian government delegation's flight back to Damascus.

-Hundreds evacuated from besieged district of Syrian

capital

(Reuters) - Aid agencies in Syria have evacuated hundreds of people from the rebel-held Damascus suburb of Yarmouk, a government-aligned Palestinian group said on Saturday, in a rare moment of coordination between the government and rebel forces.

Granting relief groups access to an estimated 250,000 people trapped by fighting acrossSyria was one of the goals of the peace talks held last week in Switzerland, which adjourned on Friday with no substantial results.

Despite lengthy discussions, the sides could not agree on passage for an aid convoy to reach 2,500 people trapped in the old city of Homs, Syria's third-largest city, with no access to food or medicine.

Anwar Raja, a spokesman for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC), which operates in Yarmouk, said the group had coordinated with the Syrian Arab Red Crescent on Friday and Saturday to extract "hundreds" of the suburb's residents.

-Obama to visit Saudi Arabia amid tensions over Iran,

Syria: report

(Reuters) - President Barack Obama plans to travel to Saudi Arabia in March on a mission to smooth tensions with Washington's main Arab ally over U.S. policy on Iran's nuclear program and the civil war in Syria, a newspaper reported.

Obama is preparing to meet with King Abdullah for a summit, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday, citing unnamed Arab officials briefed on the meetings.

"This is about a deteriorating relationship" and declining trust, said a senior Arab official in discussing the need for the summit, which was pulled together in recent days, the newspaper reported.

-Syria talks end first round, government not committed

to return

(Reuters) - A contentious week-long first round of Syrian peace talks ended on

Friday with no progress towards ending the civil war and the government

delegation unable to say whether it will return for the next round in 10 days.

Darkening the atmosphere further, the United States and Russia clashed over the

pace of Syria's handover of chemical arms for destruction. Washington accused

Damascus of foot-dragging that put the plan weeks behind schedule, and Moscow

- President Bashar al-Assad's big power ally - rejected this.

The Obama administration said it was working with partners to ratchet up

pressure on Syria to accelerate the process, but stopped short of threatening any

action if Damascus did not get the chemical weapons deliveries back on track.

-Kerry asks Russia to pressure Syria on faster chemical

arms removal

(Reuters) - U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry asked Russia's foreign minister on Friday to put pressure on the Syrian government to accelerate the removal of chemical weapons, which Kerry said is not happening quickly enough.

Kerry met Russia's Sergei Lavrov on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference to discuss what Washington considered to be "unacceptable" progress in moving Syrian chemical weapons, said a senior U.S. State Department official who spoke on condition of anonymity.

"Secretary Kerry pressed Foreign Minister Lavrov to push the regime for more progress on moving the remaining chemical weapons within Syria to the port in Latakia," the official said.

Reuters reported this week that Syria has given up less than 5 percent of its chemical weapons arsenal of roughly 1,300 tonnes of toxic agents and will miss next week's deadline to send all toxic agents abroad for destruction.

AlJazeera

-Kerry slams Syria ceasefire offer

Top US diplomat says proposal of limited ceasefire and prisoner exchange is a diversion from aims of Geneva talks.

US Secretary of State John Kerry has warned the Syrian regime it would fail to divert next week's peace talks away from the aim of installing a new government.

Syria's foreign minister said on Friday he has handed Russia plans for a ceasefire in Aleppo, and was ready to exchange lists with rebel forces on a possible prisoner swap.

Earlier on Friday, during a news conference in Moscow, Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Muallem said he had handed his Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, details of the ceasefire, plus plans for a prisoner exchange and the opening of humanitarian corridors in Syria.

-Fighting continues as Syria talks wind up

Regime forces accused of using barrel bombs on Aleppo's rebel-held areas, after Geneva summit ends without breakthrough.

Syrian opposition activists say military helicopters have dropped barrels packed with explosives in the government's latest air raids on rebel-held areas of the northern city of Aleppo, killing at least 23 people including a family trapped in a burning car.

In Aleppo, the raids with barrel bombs, as the crude weapons are known, have flattened residential

buildings, forcing defenders to flee and allowing government troops to advance, the activists say.

Saturday's attacks killed 13 people in the al-Bab area of Aleppo, Hassoun Abu Faisal of the Aleppo Media Centre said via Skype.

-US accuses Syria of stalling on chemical plan

Pace of removal has "languished", ambassador says,

with only four percent of chemical stockpile handed

over.

The United States has called on Syria to take immediate action to comply with a UN resolution to remove its chemical weapons materials, noting just four percent of Syria's declared chemical stock has been eliminated.

Efforts to remove these materials from Syria have "seriously languished and stalled", said ambassador Robert Mikulak in a statement to the Organisation

for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) on Thursday.

"Syria must immediately take the necessary actions to comply with its obligations under the Chemical Weapons Convention, Executive Council decisions, and UN Security Council Resolution 2118," said Mikulak, the US permanent representative to the OPCW.

-Syrian troops 'deliberately destroy homes'

Human Rights Watch report says destruction of rebel-

held neighbourhoods serves no military purpose.

The Syrian government has been deliberately and systematically razing homes, buildings and entire rebel-held neighbourhoods to the ground with bulldozers and explosives, according to a rights group.

A new report, released by Human Rights Watch (HRW) on Thursday, accused the regime troops of entering opposition strongholds and destroying the buildings.

Razed to the Ground: Syria’s Unlawful Neighbourhood Demolitions in 2012-2013 , documents seven cases of large-scale demolition, described as "unlawful".

“Wiping entire neighbourhoods off the map is not a legitimate tactic of war,” said Ole Solvang, emergencies researcher at HRW.

“These unlawful demolitions are the latest additions to a long list of crimes committed by the Syrian government.”

CNN

-90 killed in punishing air raids in Syria's Aleppo

(CNN) -- Ninety people were killed in a day of punishing air assaults on Aleppo as so-called barrel bombs rained down on the city, an opposition group said. Women and children were among the victims in Saturday's raids in various neighborhoods in the rebel stronghold, the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said Sunday. It added that 10 fighters from the radical Nusra Front were killed when their headquarters were targeted. Nine people were killed near Aleppo's central prison, it said. Barrel bombs -- drums packed with explosives and shrapnel -- can level entire buildings with one hit. In four hours, the area of Ansari was targeted with about 17 air strikes, one medical staffer from a field hospital in Aleppo told CNN. "The humanitarian situation is very bad, there is a huge number of wounded people," he said from the Turkish border, where he had gone to get supplies. "I am so nervous because my staff inside (have) become so confused, I have to calm them, I don't know what I will have to do for tomorrow."

-Are Syria, Iran playing Obama for a fool?

Editor's note: Frida Ghitis is a world affairs columnist

for The Miami Herald and World Politics Review. A

former CNN producer and correspondent, she is the

author of "The End of Revolution: A Changing World in

the Age of Live Television." Follow her on

Twitter@FridaGhitis. (CNN) -- Remember Syria's chemical weapons? Yes, those, the ones the Syrian regime agreed to give up after President Obama threatened to bomb. All of the "priority one" the most dangerous of those weapons, were supposed to be gone by December 31 last year. They're not. Almost all of them -- more than 95% -- are still in Syria despite a commitment by the Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to get rid of his deadly arsenal. The deal to remove Syria's stock of WMD was the one tangible accomplishment of the Obama administration's approach to the Middle East's multiple crises. Now that deal looks to be failing, even as red flags also start flying along the path to a deal with Iran.

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