Eid in Syria marred by fighting

Dozens of people were reported killed across Syria on the first day on the Muslim Eid a;-Fitr holiday, as clashes between the army and rebels continued.Meanwhile, President Bashar al-Assad was shown on state television making his first appearance in public since a July bombing that killed four top security officials, attending prayers at a Damascus mosque on Sunday.Syrians held prayers and staged demonstrations for Eid, marking the end of the fasting month of Ramadan for the second year under the shadow of a conflict the UN says has killed more than 17,000 people.Some complained they could not make the traditional visit to cemeteries to place flowers on the tombs of departed loved ones because of security fears.Six children, including four from the same extended family, were killed by shelling near their home in the rebel-held town of Maarat al-Numan in the northwestern province of Idlib, the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.In other parts of the country, troops were also reported to have bombarded the besieged city of Rastan, in the central province of Homs, and the eastern city of Deir al-Zor.The opposition Local Co-ordination Committees said 157 people were killed across the country, 51 of them in Deraa province and 47 in Damascus suburbs.In Aleppo, a lull in fighting in some of the embattled neighbourhoods gave residents a rare opportunity to search for the dead and to retrieve some of their belongings from their destroyed homes.But clashes raged in the Saif al-Dawla and Izaa districts in the city which has been a key battleground of the conflict since rebels launched an offensive there one month ago.“There is no holiday,” said Mohammed Radwan, 34, standing near an apartment building in Aleppo’s Tariq al-Bab neighbourhood, which was hit by an airstrike the day before.“The electricity comes and goes, the jets fire on us and no one has any work. All we’ll do today is clean up the rocks and rubble.”Fierce fighting continued to rage between rebel fighters and government forces for control of the city’s international airport, a strategic target for both sides.‘Neutralised inside a city’Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, a former US state department military adviser, told Al Jazeera that the rebels have managed to persevere largely because of the nature of urban warfare.“As we always see in urban terrain, the advantages that are held by a technologically superior military, such as the Syrian army, those advantages of aircraft, of tank, those are in many ways neutralised inside a city,” he said.Amid the violence, Syria’s state-run TV aired footage of Assad at prayer with his government and Baath Party officials in al-Hamad mosque.“Syria will triumph against the Western-American plot being supported by the Wahhabis and takfiris,” or Sunni Muslim hardliners, said imam Sheikh Mohammed Kheir Ghantus, echoing the regime’s long-standing rhetoric.Shaken by a July 18 bomb attack in Damascus and defections - including that of his last prime minister - Assad’s recent appearances on state TV had previously been restricted to footage of him conducting official business. He was shown swearing in the new prime minister a week ago.