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Struggle for Northern Syria Escalates Jordan Says It Won’t Accept Mass Influx of Syrian Refugees
(about 7 hours later)
BEIRUT, Lebanon — At least two dozen people, many of them Syrian government soldiers, died Wednesday when three powerful car bombs exploded in Idlib, according to the opposition, and the government announced that it was carrying out new operations in and around Idlib and Aleppo. BEIRUT, Lebanon — In the latest sign of the intense pressures Syria’s war has placed on its neighbors, Jordan’s prime minister said on Thursday that his country would not accept thousands of new refugees likely to flee Syria if President Bashar al-Assad’s government collapsed.
The moves signaled yet another escalation in the struggle for control of the northern part of the country, an important area in Syria’s civil war. “We do not encourage our Syrian brothers to come to Jordan because their country needs them more and they should remain there,” the prime minister, Abdullah Ensour, told reporters in Amman, Jordan, according to Reuters. “We will stop them and keep them in their country.”
On Thursday, Syrian activists reported dozens of deaths in the central city of Homs, news agencies reported. Jordan’s government would instead deploy special forces troops to create “secure safe havens” for the refugees inside Syrian territory, Mr. Ensour said, without elaborating.
Omar Idilbi of the Local Coordination Committees, a collection of rebel groups, was quoted by The Associated Press as saying that at least 37 civilians had died in the Homs fighting on Tuesday, while the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which tracks the conflict from Britain, put the death toll at 106 people, including women and children. His comments underscored mounting fears in Jordan that it was being destabilized by the influx of more than 200,000 refugees — many of whom live in miserable conditions in a camp near the border — and by the threat of a spreading militancy from the war. Jordan has already come under criticism from human rights groups for singling out Palestinian refugees fleeing Syria and turning them back, in what is seen as an effort to maintain Jordan’s delicate demographic balance.
Also Thursday, Jordan, which has absorbed at least 187,000 Syrian refugees since the fighting began 22 months ago, said it would not allow a mass influx of refugees to cross over the border if the Syrian government collapsed. In a meeting with reporters, news agencies and Arab newspapers in Amman, Prime Minister Abdullah Ensour said, “If thousands of Syrian refugees are driven out of the country, we won’t welcome them inside Jordan.” Instead, he said, Jordanian armed forces will create a buffer zone within Syria to hold the refugees and protect them. The flood of refugees is straining Jordan’s limited resources. Despite such concerns, Jordanian officials on Thursday tried to soften the prime minister’s comments, which raised the possibility of both a Jordanian military incursion into Syrian territory and a new humanitarian crisis. A government spokesman, Samih Maytah, said the prime minister’s comments were taken “out of context,” but offered more or less the same formulation: Jordan will continue receiving the refugees “as long as the flow continues at the same rate,” he said. But if tens or hundreds of thousands came across — “if the regime falls or chaos spreads” — Jordan will not take them in.
Wednesday’s developments followed at least two huge explosions that devastated the campus of Aleppo University a day earlier. Those blasts, which occurred as students took exams, killed scores of people. It was not immediately clear who was responsible for the attack on the university. Jordan’s warnings came as a Syrian antigovernment group called for a United Nations investigation into what it said was a mass killing of civilians by government loyalists on the outskirts of the central city of Homs. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which tracks casualties from Britain using a network of observers in Syria, said 106 people, including women and children, were killed after the loyalists raided the village of Al Haswiya on Tuesday. Whole families were killed, and some victims had been “burned inside their houses,” the observatory said in a statement.
The explosions were the worst since the conflict — which has killed more than 60,000 people, according to the United Nations — began. The opposition and the government blamed one another. An activist from the area who was interviewed on Tuesday after he fled said government troops were “executing people for no apparent reason.” The victims included his 55-year-old uncle, he said, who was killed because he was trying to film the attack.
But on Wednesday, the State Department issued a statement saying that the United States “is appalled by the Syrian regime’s deadly attack yesterday near the University of Aleppo.” But the group’s account of the attack and the death toll could not be confirmed. A journalist with the British broadcaster ITV who visited Al Haswiya on Thursday said he was told by locals and government officials that the killings occurred during fighting between rebels and government troops. The journalist, Bill Neely, said he saw blood and human remains in one house, and was told that a woman and five children had been killed there — possibly by rebel fighters who had tried to occupy the house. Residents told Mr. Neely that about 30 people had been killed in fighting around the village, which is near a military intelligence building that had come under frequent attack by rebels.
“According to eyewitnesses at the scene, regime planes launched aerial strikes in the vicinity of university facilities,” said the statement from the department’s spokeswoman, Victoria Nuland. “It became clear many people had been killed in the streets, in houses and in orchards,” Mr. Neely wrote. “Exactly what happened I can’t prove.”
The United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, also issued a statement regarding the attack at the university. “Deliberate targeting of civilians and civilian targets constitutes a war crime,” the statement said. It called on all those fighting in Syria to “abide by their obligations under international humanitarian law.” An international medical humanitarian organization, Doctors Without Borders, said on Thursday that its doctors in northern Syria had treated dozens of people injured in government attacks this week. In a statement, the group said many of the victims came from an area that has been under “almost daily” bombardment from Syrian Army helicopters for months.
On Wednesday, military planes belonging to the government of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria struck rebel targets in Aleppo and Idlib. The Syrian Army vowed to crush the armed opposition to “cleanse the homeland of their dirt.” On Tuesday afternoon, 36 people wounded by explosive “barrel bombs” dropped from the air were taken to one of the organization’s field hospitals in Idlib Province. The patients had been struck by debris or metal fragments from the bombs. One patient, a girl who suffered “skull trauma,” died as she was being transported to Turkey, the group said.
After the attacks on the university, the army said in a statement that its troops in Aleppo had killed and wounded dozens of “terrorist mercenaries,” its standard description for the rebels.

Hania Mourtada and Hwaida Saad contributed reporting from Beirut, and Ranya Kadri from Amman, Jordan.

Government troops and rebels have been locked in a deadly stalemate in Aleppo and other areas in the north since last summer. Although the rebels hold large parts of the city, they have been unable to overcome the government’s far superior firepower. The rebels have increasingly targeted state security facilities and government institutions in other parts of the country, including the capital, Damascus.
The government and the opposition gave differing accounts of the explosions in Idlib. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said that three car bombings were aimed at vehicles near the local security headquarters and a checkpoint and that at least 24 people had been killed, most of them government troops.
But Syria’s state-run SANA news agency said two suicide car bombers attacked two traffic circles, killing 22 people and wounding 30. It said security forces thwarted two other suicide bombers planning to target security forces and civilians in the area.
Also on Wednesday, clashes erupted between rebels and pro-government Kurdish gunmen in the town of Ras al-Ayn on the Turkish border, a Kurdish activist said. At least eight wounded Syrians were taken across the border to the Turkish town of Ceylanpinar for treatment. One of them died in a hospital, an official in the town said, according to The Associated Press.
The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because Turkish government rules bar civil servants from speaking to journalists without prior authorization.