Rebels Bomb Heavily Guarded Damascus Neighborhood

Muhammed Muheisen/Associated Press

A Syrian woman stood Monday in the rubble of a house destroyed by military shelling in Azaz, on the outskirts of Aleppo. More Photos »

By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK and RICK GLADSTONE

BEIRUT, Lebanon — Rebels set off two bombs among a cluster of military headquarters buildings in the Syrian capital, Damascus, on Sunday, as the new United Nations envoy for Syria pointedly refused to call for President Bashar al-Assad to give up power.

Lakhdar Brahimi has replaced Kofi Annan as the special Syria envoy for both the United Nations and the Arab League. More Photos »

“It is too early to speak about who should go and who should stay,” the new envoy, Lakhdar Brahimi, told the pan-Arab news network Al Jazeera on the eve of his first visit to Damascus since taking up the post. “Mr. Assad is there, and is the president of the present government.”

The previous envoy, Kofi Annan, who resigned in frustration last month, had joined Western leaders in calling for Mr. Assad’s exit as a prerequisite to peace.

Inside Syria, the Assad government and the armed opposition demonstrated the tenacity, violence and increasing cunning that has made the prospect of resolving the conflict seem remote.

The dual bombings, set off around 1 p.m. in the most heavily guarded neighborhood in Damascus, were the second rebel strikes in less than six weeks to land deep within the most secure corridors of the Assad government’s military machine. A bombing on July 18 killed Mr. Assad’s brother-in-law and two other top commanders of the crackdown.

Syrian state media said on Sunday that four people were injured in the blasts, but a spokesman for the rebel brigade that claimed responsibility for the bombings said the toll was higher. He insisted in a telephone interview that more than a dozen victims were taken by stretcher to the hospitals of the Syrian elite. A shopkeeper in the neighborhood recalled hearing loud explosions and seeing huge clouds of smoke and many ambulances.

The rebel spokesman claimed that officers still in the ranks of the Syrian Army had helped his group, the Brigade of the Grandsons of the Prophet, carry out the attack. “It is a message that this regime is deeply infiltrated,” he said.

Residents of the area said the explosions went off near the Defense Ministry and the headquarters of the general staff and the air forces, as well as the regional division of the ruling Baath Party. One bomb hit the office specifically responsible for military security. The attackers managed to detonate the explosives despite an especially dense and fortified concentration of military checkpoints, which have proliferated around the capital and have all but choked off traffic in the city (though soaring fuel prices have been a factor as well).

“It is very dangerous to carry out a blast in this area,” a nearby shopkeeper said, speaking anonymously for his safety. “I have to cross seven checkpoints, and the guards are checking my ID and my small truck very carefully, when I bring some boxes of goods to my shop.

“I feel the government of Assad is losing its control of the capital,” he added. “It is the most important district in Damascus, and there are explosions. I feel there is no secure region in Syria any more — the armed opposition can reach to every district and the suburbs in Damascus.”

Elsewhere, Syrian state media reported that a car bomb was detonated Saturday night outside a mosque near a Palestinian refugee camp, killing 15 people. The report could not be confirmed.

Despite the attacks in the capital, the Assad government has showed no difficulty in mounting military operations simultaneously against several areas of armed opposition around the country. In the south, troops and warplanes continued to blast civilian populations that had harbored rebels in and around Dara’a, the provincial capital and birthplace of the uprising. Residents told Reuters on Sunday that after artillery shelling over the weekend, troops were burning and bulldozing hundreds of homes left by residents who had fled to Jordan. “Old Dara’a is deserted,” a resident, Ahmad Abu Nabout, told Reuters.

In the north, the military used more focused attacks to stymie a rebel advance on Aleppo, the country’s commercial capital, and to punish rebel supporters there. At the same time, the army drew from existing troop strength in the area to attack opponents around Homs and the Damascus suburbs.

Witnesses said that on Sunday, soldiers used bulldozers to demolish dozens of homes near the Iranian Embassy, in an area of informal housing considered a haven of support for the rebels. Near Hama, opposition activists said that 35 people — most of them said to be civilians — were killed by gunfire in the village of Al Fan Al Shamali. The reports also could not be confirmed.

While the fighting continued, Mr. Brahimi, a veteran diplomat for Algeria and the United Nations, reintroduced himself to the Arab world in interviews over the weekend with Al Jazeera and a rival news network, Al Arabiya. “Change is necessary, indispensable, unavoidable,” he told Al Jazeera. But he said it was too soon to talk about the form of that change, its stages, or where it might leave Mr. Assad.

Mr. Brahimi noted that his predecessor, Mr. Annan, had spoken directly with Mr. Assad, just as he intends to do.

“I call on parties inside Syria to halt the fighting,” Mr. Brahimi said. “Undoubtedly, this call is primarily directed to the government. More than others, it is the duty of governments — under any circumstances and anywhere, not just in Syria — to ensure security and stability for their people.”

In 1989, Mr. Brahimi helped to broker an end to a decade-long civil war in Lebanon, acting as a special envoy for the Arab League. He later led the United Nations observer mission during the 1994 elections in South Africa that followed the end of apartheid. And he has served as a special representative for the United Nations in Afghanistan and Iraq.

In an interview with The New York Times last week, Mr. Brahimi, who is 78, noted that he had known Mr. Assad’s late father, Hafez al-Assad, who ruled Syria for 29 years before his death in 2000.

The younger Mr. Assad, who turns 48 on Sept. 11, “is more the age of my son,” Mr. Brahimi said. “I’m not close to him or anything. But I did meet him several times. So I know him, and he knows me.”

Mr. Brahimi said he sympathized with Mr. Annan’s frustrations as the Syria envoy, particularly over the diplomatic deadlock at the Security Council that left him without much real muscle to back up his efforts.

But Mr. Brahimi said he believed the council’s members were now more intent on helping the diplomatic effort succeed. “I think they’re all very much aware that they had not supported Kofi Annan as much as he needed,” Mr. Brahimi said. “And I presume that these are very responsible people, and they would like to do better.”

He said he hoped to avoid any form of foreign military intervention in Syria; at the moment, Turkey has proposed imposing a no-fly zone and establishing safe havens within Syria for opponents of the government and civilians displaced by the conflict. When force becomes involved in diplomacy, Mr. Brahimi said, “it means failure.”

David D. Kirkpatrick reported from Beirut, and Rick Gladstone from the United Nations. Hwaida Saad contributed reporting from Beirut, and an employee of The New York Times from Syria.