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At Least 40 Die as Planes Bomb a Syrian Town Held by Rebels Seized by Rebels, Town Is Crushed by Syrian Forces
(about 7 hours later)
BEIRUT, Lebanon — Syrian military aircraft bombed a town held by insurgents along a vital north-south highway in northern Syria on Thursday, leveling apartment buildings and a mosque and killing more than 40 people, including many children, according to activists and graphic videos uploaded on the Internet. BEIRUT, Lebanon — The town of Maarat al-Noaman in northern Syria was just last week the scene of a major victory for the insurgents, who drove government forces from checkpoints at a crucial crossroads on a major highway, apprehended scores of soldiers, celebrated atop captured armored vehicles and declared the town “liberated.”
The aerial bombardment of the town, Maarat al-Noaman in Idlib Province, was among the most intense since the Syrian military began regularly deploying warplanes and helicopters in its effort to crush the armed insurgency against President Bashar al-Assad. On Thursday, jubilation turned to horror as government airstrikes sent fountains of dust and rubble skyward and crushed several dozen people who had returned to what they thought was a new haven in a country mired in civil war, according to reporters on the scene for a Western news agency, and antigovernment fighters and activists who backed up their accounts with videos posted online.
The Local Coordination Committees, an anti-Assad activist group, said “dozens of people were martyred” in the bombardment, which it described as having been carried out by MiG fighters of the Syrian Air Force. A number of videos posted on YouTube showed rescue workers and wailing family members searching for victims crushed in apartment houses that had been destroyed by bombs. Men stumbled over rubble, carrying single bones nearly shorn of flesh and shredded body parts barely identifiable as human. Amid a swirling crowd of rescuers, two young men embraced and wept. A man in a baseball cap pointed out crumpled buildings that, he said, crushed women, children and elderly people sheltering there. An infant in a pink shirt lay motionless, then opened its eyes. “God is great,” said a rescuer, cradling the baby in his arms.
Agence France-Presse, which said it had a correspondent at the scene, reported that 44 corpses had been recovered and that plastic bags marked “body parts” had been placed in a makeshift field hospital. The A.F.P. dispatch said the attack had been carried out by several fighter jets that made short dives to drop at least 10 bombs on the town and its eastern edge, near an army base that has been under rebel assault. Maarat al-Noaman’s reversal of fortune highlights the dark turn that Syria’s civil war has taken in recent months, as fighting intensifies and the government and insurgents remain locked in an increasingly bloody stalemate, Syrian residents and military analysts said.
Maarat al-Noaman is strategically located along the Damascus-Aleppo highway that connects Syria’s two largest cities. Insurgents who have been seeking to cut the Syrian Army’s supply lines to Aleppo took control of Maarat al-Noaman on Oct. 9 and had been celebrating what they called the liberation of the town. When rebels declare a town liberated, President Bashar al-Assad’s government no longer makes much effort to retake territory, they said. Now, it sends overwhelming force with one objective — to destroy and level all that is left behind.
Many Maarat al-Noaman residents who fled during the insurgents’ battle to seize the town had apparently returned before the bombing on Thursday, thinking the danger had passed. Regaining and maintaining control requires resources the government, stretched on many fronts by the 19-month conflict, cannot afford, said Emile Hokayem, a Middle East-based analyst at the International Institute for Strategic Studies. “So,” he added, “they actually have no problem completely destroying it.”
More than 20,000 people have been killed since the anti-Assad uprising began in March 2011, according to United Nations estimates. Activist groups say the toll exceeds 30,000. Gutting and abandoning towns rather than trying to govern them shifts responsibility for reconstruction and relief onto the shoulders of the underequipped rebels, breeding frustration, Mr. Hokayem said, a tactic that suggests the government has given up on winning the trust of its people.
The Maarat al-Noaman bombing comes as the new joint special envoy from the United Nations and Arab League, Lakhdar Brahimi, has been seeking support for a cease-fire in Syria tied to the Muslim holiday of Id al-Adha, which begins a week from Friday. Mr. Brahimi, who was visiting Jordan on Thursday and intended to visit Syria in coming days, has expressed hope that a religious reprieve universally respected by Muslims could be the basis not only for a pause in the fighting but perhaps the beginning of a dialogue in Syria. “They’re not after regaining the hearts of the population,” he said. “The calculation is that what’s needed is for the population to start resenting the rebels, not to start liking the Assad regime again.”
But neither side in the Syria conflict has shown much interest in talking, and Mr. Brahimi’s prospects for success are uncertain at best. That dynamic — rebel gains, army crackdowns and ensuing resentment against rebels as well as the government — has played out again and again in recent months, most recently in Aleppo, Syria’s largest city. Rebels last month began what they said would be an all-out offensive there. But the result was to spread fighting into previously peaceful neighborhoods and damage the city’s beloved historic center, leaving many residents as angry at the rebels for bringing the fight there as at the government for its harsh response.
In a new sign of irreconcilable differences between Mr. Assad and the opposition, an international rights group reported Thursday that 28,000 to 80,000 Syrians had been “forcibly disappeared” by Mr. Assad’s government since the start of the uprising. The rights group, Avaaz, said in a news release on its Web site that it had spoken to many friends and relatives of the missing and was sharing the information with the United Nations Human Rights Council. In Maarat al-Noaman over the past week, rebels attempted to provide some services. They tried to distribute bread after the government shelled bakeries, activists said, a tactic used in several cities, according to a recent Human Rights Watch report. But some of those efforts appeared ad hoc and rudimentary: an antigovernment video showed boys, girls and adults lining up as men handed out bread from the trunk of a small white sedan.
“Whether it is women buying groceries or farmers going for fuel, nobody is safe,” said Alice Jay, the campaign director at Avaaz. “This is a deliberate strategy to terrorize families and communities.” Abu Ahmed, the commander of a group of fighters from the nearby village of Sinbol, said in a Skype interview on Thursday that kerosene supplies had sunk so low in the town that rebels had to form a committee to keep people from cutting down olive trees for fuel.

Hwaida Saad reported from Beirut, and Rick Gladstone from New York.

An even thornier problem arose that one rebel commander said had left his brigade “seriously confused”: how to manage the scores of government soldiers captured in the rebel offensive.
“We don’t know what we’re going do with them,” the commander, who asked that his name not be used and claimed to be holding 600 prisoners, said in a Skype interview on Tuesday. Even feeding them “one loaf, tomato or potato” a day would be too expensive, he said. “We don’t have food even to feed our families.”
But if the prisoners were released, he said, they might rejoin the army or pro-government militias. He said he was beginning to wish they had died in the fighting.
Yet the battle exposed weaknesses and strengths on both sides.
While the destruction on Thursday renewed questions about the rebels’ tactic of seizing territory, their earlier victory showed their growing capability and the strain on government forces. Rebels claimed they had been able to seize for a time all the checkpoints between Maarat al-Noaman and Khan Sheikhoun, 10 miles to the south along the north-south highway that is the main artery between Damascus and Aleppo.
Lt. Ahmad Haleeb, a rebel officer, said in an interview that he had fought with more than 150 troops and that they had killed 65 soldiers and captured seven in a fight for a checkpoint. In one government-held building, a cultural center, rebels shot video of a dozen dead, shirtless men they said had been security detainees apparently executed as troops fled.
Several units worked together, one attacking government reinforcements en route to the battle, activists and fighters said last week. Videos described as having been made during the battle showed rebels shooting down a helicopter, using small-arms fire in coordinated squads, firing rocket-propelled grenades and heavy-caliber weapons mounted on flatbed trucks, and even appearing to commandeer an armored vehicle.
They surrounded an army base at Wadi al-Deif, near Maarat al-Noaman, where on Thursday, activists and fighters said, government soldiers were still trapped without access to supplies amid new shelling by rebels.
“At a purely tactical level that was a defeat for the regime,” Mr. Hokayem said of Maarat al-Noaman.
On Thursday, the government said it was pushing rebels out of the town. SANA, the Syrian state news agency, reported that the army was “cleaning” the area and had “killed a large number of terrorists.” It said the army had uncovered caves and tunnels storing weapons, and had destroyed heavy weapons as well as 60 bombs weighing hundreds of pounds each.
But Abu Ahmed, the commander, said that rebels still controlled one side of town and aimed to control routes to Aleppo and north to Saraqeb, Idlib and Turkey.
Maarat al-Noaman drew attention because of its strategic location, the rebels’ unusually well-documented gains and the vivid photographs and reporting by Agence France-Presse journalists who were also present during the airstrike on Thursday.
The town, with a prewar population of about 120,000, was an obscure provincial enclave known mainly for the Alma Arra museum, a 16th-century former traders’ inn housing a collection of Byzantine mosaics and pre-Islamic pottery — and, on the entryway floor, a mosaic portrait of Mr. Assad and his father and predecessor, Hafez al-Assad.
But Maarat al-Noaman has broader significance as an archetype of Syria’s neglected midsize towns. The country’s hinterland is dotted with more than 120 towns with populations of more than 20,000, and battles have ravaged many that poverty and resentment made hotbeds of rebellion.
In his effort to win over Syria’s elite with new economic freedoms early in his rule, before the uprising, Mr. Assad courted Damascus at the expense of the periphery that had long been the base of his Baath Party.
“He won Damascus,” said Mr. Hokayem, the strategic studies institute analyst, “but he lost Syria.”

Hania Mourtada contributed reporting from Beirut, and Rick Gladstone from New York.