BEIRUT, Lebanon – Syrian forces carried out what antigovernment activists described as furious assaults against a range of insurgent enclaves on Thursday, seeking to snap a stalemate in the central city of Homs, attacking rebels ensconced in a seaport near Russia’s naval station and apparently destroying a historic bridge in the contested western city of Deir al-Zour.
The new fighting may have left dozens of people dead just in the area of the seaport, Baniyas, and a nearby village, Bayda, according to activists affiliated with two antigovernment groups, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights and the Local Coordination Committees. Some activists said more than 100 were killed in Bayda, including entire families, among them the mayor and his children.
Efforts to corroborate those reports were difficult because of restricted access for journalists in Syria. State media said nothing about civilian casualties in the seaport combat, which the official SANA news agency described as part of a campaign to seize weapons in a “raid against terrorists’ dens.”
There were also reports of sectarian fighting near the border with Lebanon around the Syrian town of Qusair, a flash point between insurgent Sunni fighters and Shiite militants loyal to Hezbollah, the Lebanese militant organization that has sided with President Bashar al-Assad of Syria in the conflict and partly depends on him for weapons.
Activists and medical workers reached by telephone said that civilians were trying to evacuate the Qusair area and that many people had been wounded.
Sunni-Shiite hostilities in Syria also appeared to have been further inflamed by what both SANA and Hezbollah-controlled media in Lebanon called the grave-site desecration of a revered figure in Shiite history by insurgent fighters in Adra, a town north of Damascus. The reported pillaging of the tomb, containing Hajar Ibn Adi Al Kindi, one of the Prophet Muhammad’s companions, would be a direct challenge to Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Hasrallah, who in a speech this week publicly warned Syria’s Sunni fighters against such actions.
It was unclear whether the widened scope of fighting on Thursday signaled a dangerous new phase in the country’s civil war, which has become increasingly sectarian in nature and which by United Nations calculations has left more than 70,000 people dead.
The fighting coincided with what might have been the first armed clash between Syrian insurgent fighters and Turkish border guards, resulting in at least one Turkish death. The circumstances behind the clash, at the Akcakale crossing in Turkey’s Sanliurfa district, were not immediately clear. Turkey, which shares a 550-mile border with Syria, has officially sided with the Syrian opposition in the two-year-old conflict and is home to at least 300,000 Syrian refugees.
Opposition activists said Thursday’s military campaign seemed partly designed to eject rebel fighters from Homs, Syria’s third-largest city and long a hotbed of the insurgency, which has defied multiple attempts by Mr. Assad’s forces to crush resistance there. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which is based in Britain and draws information from activists in Syria, said loyalist forces had regained control of the strategically placed Wadi Sayeh district in the center of Homs.
Opposition activists said fighting was especially fierce in the Ras Rifa neighborhood of Baniyas, on the Mediterranean coast north of the Tartus naval refueling station, Russia’s last remaining military outpost in the Middle East and an important symbol of the resilient Russian support for Mr. Assad’s government.
The Syrian Observatory said that government forces shelled Ras Rifa, with smoke seen billowing from the area, and that gunfire could be heard throughout the city as well as in nearby Bayda. It was the first time the government side had attacked the Baniyas area since troops stormed parts of the city in May 2011.
Thursday’s fighting there seemed to harden the overwhelmingly sectarian nature of the conflict, directed at Syria’s majority Sunni Muslims by representatives of the Alawite minority, an offshoot of Shiite Islam that has provided the bedrock of the Assad family’s power base in Syria for four decades.
“The Alawites here are sectarian in every sense of the word and yet they accuse us of being prejudiced,” a Baniyas resident who identified himself as Abu Dajana said by telephone. “Starting today, I am sectarian. I don’t want ‘peaceful’ anymore. My brothers and friends are dying from the shelling.”
The Local Coordination Committees reported that a number of houses were set afire in Baniyas. It also reported, without attribution, mass arrests and summary executions by pro-government forces in Bayda, with “dozens of martyrs, including women by gunfire, knives and then burning the dead.”
In Deir al-Zour, a western Syrian city that has been a recurrent battleground in the conflict, the Syrian Observatory reported that government forces shelled rebel positions and destroyed part of the Muaalak Bridge over the Euphrates River. A SANA dispatch later disputed that account, asserting the bridge was hit by rocket-propelled grenades launched by terrorists, its description of rebel fighters.
The suspension bridge, built in the 1920s during French occupation, is a replica of a bridge in southern France and was regarded as an important piece of Syrian history. Activist videos uploaded on YouTube showed the remnants of the bridge, its pillars seemingly intact but the suspension gone.
In Washington, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel confirmed Thursday that the Obama administration was rethinking its opposition to arming the rebels, although he said no decisions had been made. President Obama has said the use of such weapons would be a “red line” that could lead to military intervention. But he has also said the evidence is incomplete and he wants verifiable facts.
At the United Nations, senior diplomats and U.N. officials said that with the surge in fighting and no progress on the political front, Lakhdar Brahimi, the special envoy to Syria, was expected to resign his post. Mr. Brahimi, a veteran diplomatic trouble shooter, was appointed last fall after the first envoy, Kofi Annan, the former secretary general, also resigned.
Hania Mourtada reported from Beirut, and Rick Gladstone from New York. Reporting was contributed by Hwaida Saad from Beirut, Alan Cowell from Paris, Sebnem Arsu from Istanbul, Thom Shanker and Mark Landler from Washington, and Neil MacFarquhar from the United Nations.
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Syrian Forces Strike Rebels in Wide-Ranging Assaults
BEIRUT, Lebanon – Syrian forces carried out what antigovernment activists described as furious assaults against a range of insurgent enclaves on Thursday, seeking to snap a stalemate in the central city of Homs, attacking rebels ensconced in a