Fight for Damascus escalates in Syria's bloodiest week yet SYRIAN forces attacked parts of Damascus with helicopter gunships yesterday, witnesses said, rounding people up as troops clawed back territory a week after opposition fighters launched a major assault on the capital. In a further escalation of a conflict that opponents of President Bashar al-Assad have turned into all-out civil war, fighting raged around the intelligence headquarters in the biggest city Aleppo and in Deir al-Zor, a major city in the east. Syrian forces regained control of one of two border crossings seized by rebels on the frontier with Iraq, Iraqi officials said, but rebels said they had captured a third crossing with Turkey, Bab al-Salam, north of Aleppo. "Seizing the border crossings does not have strategic importance but it has a psychological impact because it demoralises Assad's force," a senior Syrian army defector in Turkey, Staff Brigadier Faiz Amr, said. The rebels said they lost 12 men and 40 were wounded during a 24-day siege they mounted to take the Bab al-Salam border post. The rebel commanding officer in the area, Abu Omar, said they took the crossing point yesterday without a fight. There were two armoured vehicles at the gate and they escaped. This is a safe zone for us and we don't expect the army to come and attack," he said. The bombardments in Damascus and Deir al-Zor were some of the fiercest yet and showed Mr Assad's determination to avenge a bomb last Wednesday that killed four members of his high command. Rebels were driven from Mezzeh, the diplomatic district of Damascus, residents and opposition activists said, and more than 1,000 government troops and allied militiamen poured into the area, backed by armoured vehicles, tanks and bulldozers. Three people were killed and 50 others, mostly civilians, were wounded in the early morning bombardment, said Thabet, a Mezzeh resident. "The district is besieged and the wounded are without medical care," he said. The neighbourhood of Barzeh, one of three northern areas hit by helicopter fire, was also under siege, by troops from the elite 4th division. The division is run by Assad's younger brother, Maher al-Assad, 41, who is widely seen as the muscle maintaining the Assad family's Alawite minority rule. His role has become more crucial since Mr Assad's defence and intelligence ministers, a top general and his powerful brother-in-law were killed by the bomb on Wednesday. Mr Assad has not spoken in public since the bombing. Israeli intelligence yesterday said that he and his family remained in the capital. Diplomats and opposition sources said government forces were focusing on strategic centres, with one Western diplomat comparing Mr Assad to a doctor "abandoning the patient's limbs to save the organs." The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said 1,261 people had been killed across Syria since last Sunday when the fighting escalated in Damascus, including 299 of Mr Assad's forces, making it by far the bloodiest week in an uprising that has claimed the lives of 18,000 people. The escalating bloodshed and increasing chaos is threatening to spill across borders into a larger regional conflagration. It has put Syria's neighbours, particularly Israel, on edge.