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Explosion Levels Hotel Housing Government Troops in Syria An Explosion and a Blockade, and a Syrian Pact Is in Limbo
(about 9 hours later)
BEIRUT, Lebanon — A hotel used by Syrian government troops in the northern city of Aleppo was leveled by a huge explosion on Thursday, after Islamic militants tunneled underneath the building and planted explosives linked to remote detonators, activist groups and state media reported. BEIRUT, Lebanon — A deal to evacuate insurgents from the Old City of Homs in central Syria hit a snag on Thursday when rebels in Aleppo Province refused to allow all of a humanitarian convoy to enter two villages they had blockaded, as called for under a pact between the government and the rebels, opposition activists and a pro-government television channel reported.
There was no immediate word on casualties. Video footage whose authenticity could not immediately be confirmed showed huge clouds of gray smoke blotting out the Aleppo skyline. The problems came as insurgents in the northern city of Aleppo set off an enormous explosion that leveled the historic Carlton Hotel, facing the city’s ancient citadel, where government troops had been billeted. Clouds of dust and debris towered above the citadel’s ramparts, underscoring the insurgents’ vow to continue the fight and their ability to carry out damaging attacks despite retreating from Homs.
The Islamic Front, one of the biggest insurgent groups in Syria, claimed responsibility for the blast, saying the attack was a response to the mass killing of unarmed civilians in Aleppo. The group, a coalition of insurgents including former Free Syrian Army fighters and members of harder-core Islamist factions, said the attack was a prelude to a “large-scale operation” meant to secure territorial gains. The Islamic Front, the insurgent coalition that claimed responsibility for the blast, also controls territory where the aid convoys were blocked from entering the villages of Nubol and Zahra. Its members are among those who have objected to the deal on the grounds that rebels should make no compromise with the government. 
The state news agency, SANA, said the attack had rocked the Old City area of Aleppo and destroyed historical sites there. The attackers blew up tunnels they dug under archaeological buildings, SANA said. The government was preventing the last busload of fighters from leaving Homs’s Old City until the aid was allowed to reach the villages, the Lebanese television channel Al Mayadeen reported, leaving the completion of the deal in limbo. Several hundred fighters remained in the Old City after nearly 1,000 left on Wednesday for insurgent-held areas in northern Homs Province. Scores of prisoners and hostages held by rebels in Aleppo and Latakia Provinces have been released.
The destroyed hotel was seen in Internet images as a pale stone building in traditional style with palm trees outside. State television identified it as the Carlton, which was built as a hospital in the era of Ottoman rule before World War I and later renovated and reopened as a hotel, facing the historic citadel in Aleppo. Government forces had been billeted there for two years. The problems on Thursday highlighted the challenges of carrying out a deal that requires cooperation from far-flung, disconnected insurgent groups. The accord, which provides for rebels to leave the blockaded Old City with their weapons and hand over the symbolic territory to the government, has been seen as a turning point for both sides after a nearly two-year standoff that has reduced fighters and civilians in the center of Homs, once called the “city of the revolution,” to eating grass.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an opposition group that is based in Britain and collects information from contacts inside Syria, said Islamist forces had tunneled under the hotel from areas held by rebels seeking the overthrow of President Bashar al-Assad. Despite the hitches, several more busloads of rebels arrived in northern Homs and could be seen, in videos posted online, smiling and hugging in apparent relief. The governor, Talal Barazi, toured a damaged square just outside the Old City with television cameras, vowing against a backdrop of blackened buildings, “When the armed men leave the Old City of Homs, we will rebuild the city in no time.”
Aleppo, the country’s largest city, has been carved into a checkerboard of areas held by one side or the other as the Syrian civil war has intensified. Government forces have been bombing rebel areas from the air, while the rebels have detonated car bombs and fired mortar rounds into government-held districts. Mr. Barazi did not address the presence of increasingly pro-government militias, some of whose members have expressed anger at anything short of total defeat for the insurgents. He said that a similar evacuation deal was in the works for the last rebel-held neighborhood in Homs, Hay al-Waer, an area of high-rises on the city’s outskirts. Some 200,000 people in the neighborhood, half of them displaced from elsewhere, remain under a government blockade and shelling.
The attack in Aleppo came a day after rebels in the city of Homs began evacuating positions they had held since the revolt against Mr. Assad took root in 2011. The evacuation was seen as a bitter defeat and emotional blow for antigovernment forces there, but it was not clear whether the bomb in Aleppo was intended as a direct response. Saying a process of reconciliation was underway, Mr. Barazi and state television correspondents were careful to describe those departing as gunmen or fighters, not terrorists, as official news media have typically called the entire armed opposition.
Homs is Syria’s third-largest city, and was one of the first where peaceful protests turned to armed combat; it was also among the first to experience indiscriminate bombing by government forces, a bellwether for the nation’s descent into turmoil. With Mr. Barazi on state television was Yacoub El Hillo, the senior United Nations official in Syria, who praised the deal as a way of calming the conflict. United Nations vehicles accompanied the departing insurgents and the aid convoy, along with the Syrian Arab Red Crescent.
Talal Barazi, the provincial governor in Homs, said 80 percent of the rebel fighters had left their positions in the city center under a truce, and the rest were scheduled to leave on Thursday, Reuters reported. Ahmad al-Ali, a member of a local government committee in Homs, told state television: “We won. We are standing here in the heart of Homs, and all the unwanted are leaving the town.”
Rebels tried once before this year to tunnel under the hotel in Aleppo and blow it up. That attack did damage but did not force government troops to abandon the building. Some opponents of the government have described the deal as a way of pushing people opposed to President Bashar al-Assad, disproportionately Sunni Muslims, out of Homs, and have expressed concern that the demographic makeup of the diverse city, Syria’s third largest, is being altered.
Tamam, an activist from Aleppo now living in Turkey who did not give his surname for fear of reprisals, said in an interview that government forces had turned the hotel into a military base where snipers and mortar crews could attack much of the city’s old quarter. It was unclear why the convoy to the Aleppo villages had failed. Some reports said that insurgents had wanted to allow in only a few trucks, but that the government had refused to let the convoy go farther unless all 12 trucks were allowed.
Government supporters in Aleppo speculated in postings on Facebook that the rebels detonated two tunnels packed with explosives on Thursday, one under the hotel and the other in a different neighborhood. Jamal Awad, a local official from Zahra who fled to a Damascus suburb, said in a telephone interview that the first truck had been stopped by insurgents, emptied and forced to go back. “Our men in the village were watching what was happening” through binoculars, he said. “They saw the armed group quarreling.”
The tactic of tunneling under opponents’ fortifications has nearly a 900-year pedigree in Aleppo. When Crusaders besieged a Muslim-held castle there in 1131, the premature collapse of a siege tunnel fatally injured their leader, Count Joscelin I of Edessa. But in an indication that other aspects of the deal were moving forward, Mr. Awad said insurgents had released 13 of the 63 civilians abducted from a bus months ago.
In video images posted on YouTube, the Islamic Front showed what it said was a similar attack this week on a government outpost in Idlib, southwest of Aleppo. The images showed a huge blast in which the Islamic Front said 35 government soldiers had died. State television said that insurgents had freed at least 40 women and children in Latakia Province after killing numerous civilians there last year in villages populated by the Alawite minority, to which Mr. Assad belongs. The massacre was documented by Human Rights Watch.
In Aleppo, the Islamic Front declared that the attack on the hotel, by fighters who tunneled underneath it, had killed 50 soldiers and was a response to the indiscriminate bombing that has killed hundreds of civilians in the province in recent months. The front, an Islamist coalition that includes many groups that broke off from the Western-backed Free Syrian Army, said the attack was a prelude to a “large-scale operation” meant to secure territorial gains.
A state television reporter was shown in front of what was left of the hotel: a hill of large stone blocks where just the tops of palm trees, once standing in the hotel courtyard, poked through. He said that soldiers had been posted there but that there was no sign of rescue activity. SANA, the state news agency, did not mention casualties, but said that the “enormous attack” had destroyed historical sites and that explosives had been detonated “under archaeological buildings.”
The Carlton was built as a hospital in the era of Ottoman rule before World War I. According to residents, government forces had lived there for two years, using it as a base for sniper and mortar attacks, and also hold positions in the citadel. Insurgents, too, operate in Aleppo’s sprawling medieval Old City, drawing government bombardment that has severely damaged the area. The United Nations has called on all sides to stop bombing historic sites and using them as bases.
The tactic of tunneling under opponents’ fortifications has a nearly 900-year pedigree in Aleppo: When Crusaders besieged a Muslim-held castle there in 1131, the premature collapse of a siege tunnel killed their leader, Count Joscelin I of Edessa.
In video images posted on YouTube, the Islamic Front showed what it said was a similar attack this week on a government outpost in Idlib, southwest of Aleppo. The images showed a huge blast in which the group said 35 government soldiers had died.