Feared forces headed by President Bashar al-Assad’s brother used helicopter gunships in a new offensive against rebels in Damascus on Sunday, as fighting also raged in Syria’s second city Aleppo.

The Fourth Brigade headed by Maher al-Assad was leading the assault in the Damascus district of Barzeh, triggering a mass exodus of residents from the area, said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

The Britain-based rights watchdog put the overall death toll from the 16-month uprising in Syria at more than 19,000 -- the vast majority of them civilians.

In Damascus, the official news agency SANA said government forces had “cleansed” the Qaboon neighbourhood of “terrorists,” the regime’s term for rebel fighters.

State television ran footage reportedly from Qaboon showing dead bodies as well as weapons, communications equipment and money it said was captured from insurgents.

The Observatory said regime troops had launched an assault on the Barzeh district of Damascus.
“Troops have stormed the northwestern Barzeh district of Damascus with tanks and armed personnel carriers,” the group said, noting snipers had been deployed on rooftops.

“Two helicopters are pounding the Barzeh district, and towers of smoke are rising above the neighbourhood,” the Observatory’s Rami Abdel Rahman told AFP. “The deployment in Barzeh is very heavy.”

“Barzeh is being stormed by the feared Fourth Brigade,” Abdel Rahman added, noting that dozens of residents were fleeing the neighbourhood.

Regime forces also deployed in the outskirts of the Mazzeh district of the capital, he said, adding one person was killed there today and several were wounded.

Meanwhile, fierce clashes engulfed the districts of Salaheddin and Sakhur in Aleppo, Syria’s commercial hub in the north which has seen heavy fighting since Friday, said Abdel Rahman.

The army’s assault on Salaheddin began at dawn, in a bid to reclaim it from rebel hands, an anti-regime activist in the city told AFP.

9,000 Syrian refugees reach Iraq
Iraq’s Kurdish region has received up to 9,000 Syrian refugees looking to flee their homeland following ongoing violence, Xinhua quoted a Kurdish official as saying.

“The camps, which prepared for Syrian refugees crossing the (Syria-Kurdistan) border, continue receiving increasing numbers of refugees,” Mohammed Abdullah, head of the directorate of Immigration and Immigrants of Kurdistan’s Duhuk province, said Saturday.

“Till today we have received 9,000 of them,” he added.
The Kurdish regional government in cooperation with international and some local humanitarian organisations are offering various aids to the refugees who are mostly Kurds coming from Syria’s Kurdish cities adjacent to the Iraqi Kurdistan region.

On Friday, the central government in Baghdad expressed its inability to receive Syrian refugees because of the poor logistics and security situation in the Iraq.

Syria has been wrecked by bombings and violence against civilians since March 2011, when anti-government protests began. The unrest has claimed thousands of lives.