Exodus of 30,000 as Assad's forces fight back

Syrian troops fought on the corpse-strewn streets of Damascus and at far-flung border posts on Friday to reverse gains by rebels, who have advanced relentlessly in the 48 hours since much of President Bashar al-Assad's entourage was assassinated.

The worsening violence prompted an exodus from the capital, with more than 30,000 vehicles mostly packed with families crossing into Lebanon in the past two days, according to officials in Beirut.

Aid agencies expressed concern over the humanitarian dimension to the crisis caused by the surge in refugees, as the Lebanese Red Cross set up an emergency medical team with three ambulances at the Masnaa crossing.

"We have gone from an average of 1,000 a day to possibly up to 30,000 in the last 48 hours," said Sybella Wilkes of the UN's refugee agency UNHCR. "This is really significant, it is clearly a massive upscaling in displacement."

UNHCR appealed for Syria's neighbours to keep their borders open to allow people to reach safe havens, but the Iraqi army sealed the main border crossing to Syria at Abu Kamal with concrete blast walls to guard against any escalation in fighting after rebels seized a border post on the other side from government forces. About 80 buses carrying Iraqi refugees have crossed from Syria into Iraq in the past few days, after Baghdad ordered all its citizens to leave.

Though Syria's state television boasted of army gains in Damascus, the heaviest fighting of the 16-month uprising erupted in Aleppo, Syria's second city, while rebel fighters consolidated their control over several critical border crossings along the Turkish and Iraqi frontiers.

In a further blow to Assad's authority, state television confirmed that Hisham Ikhtiyar, the head of general security, had become the fourth fatality among the president's elite inner sanctum after he died of wounds sustained in the attack.

More than 600 people are estimated to have died since the assassination on Wednesday, an indication that Syria's civil war has become a bloody and protracted fight to the finish after 16 months of turmoil.

A day after Russia and China vetoed a British resolution threatening Assad with sanctions if he did not take steps to end the violence, the Security Council finally overcame its differences to extend the mandate of its 300-strong observer mission to Syria by a further 30 days.

But with the chief observer, Maj Gen Robert Mood, declaring that mission was an "irrelevance" in the absence of a political solution to the crisis, the belated display of international unity appeared largely inconsequential. The regime claimed to have "cleansed" the suburb of Midan after a massive assault involving tanks, helicopter gunships and artillery, with troops posing victoriously for cameras.

"Our heroic forces have completely cleansed the Midan area of terrorist mercenaries," state television announced.

The rebels fought doggedly to retain their foothold in the capital, but their inferiority in both numbers and firepower began to tell.

For the rebels, who presented their withdrawal as a "tactical retreat", it was undoubtedly a setback, the first of their six-day campaign,"Operation Damascus Volcano", to bring the rebellion to the capital. Rebel corpses were shown strewn across streets lined with rubble and burnt-out vehicles, although sniper fire audible in parts of the district suggested that it had not been entirely subdued.

With heavy fighting restricted largely to the periphery of Damascus, a veneer of normality returned to its inner districts. The streets were still largely deserted, but a few shops reopened.

Amateur video footage showed bodies lying along Khalid Ibn Walid street, a major thoroughfare leading to Midan, as gunfire crackled nearby.

A second video showed panicked civilians fleeing as shots rang out in Tijara, the city's main financial district.

While the army claims to maintain a tenuous hold in the centre of the city by day, night-time gun battles on streets considered the safest in the country just weeks ago suggest no one is in control.

Demonstrating that their ability to strike anywhere had not been blunted, rebel forces overran and set ablaze a military barracks in Damascus said to have been used as a training ground for Mr Assad's feared Shabbiha militia.

"The strategy is to retain control of the outskirts of Damascus and launch lightning assaults on key installations," said one opposition activist in Damascus. "The aim is gradually to wear down the regime until it is too weak to defend the city."

In Aleppo, clashes were reported in four districts - Salaheddin, Azimiyeh, Akramiyeh and Ard el-Sabbagh - although it was unclear who initiated them.

For weeks, government forces and rebels have fought heavy battles in the country around Aleppo, with opposition fighters steadily closing in on the city, which has so far been largely loyalist. They may finally have gained a foothold after army units were pulled back to the capital.