Beirut • Three gunmen ambushed a military general on a residential street in Damascus on Saturday, the Syrian government reported, in an assassination of a government stalwart that was the first of its kind in the Syrian capital and another step away from the nonviolent roots of the antigovernment protests.
The general, Issa al-Khouli, a middle-aged physician and brigadier general who ran the Hameish military hospital, was shot dead as he stepped from his house in the morning, the state-run Syrian Arab News Agency reported. Acquaintances of al-Khouli’s reached by telephone confirmed his death, though not the details.
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The doctor, trained in Romania and France, came from an Alawite family with close ties inside the Assad government that has run Syria for the past 40 years, according to one activist in Syria who was piecing together his biography.
He is believed to have been the nephew of Mohamed al-Khouli, the former head of the widely feared Air Force Intelligence Directorate, the most powerful of the multiple security agencies that cement the government’s power. The elder al-Khouli was a security adviser to President Hafez Assad until the president died in 2000.
The Assad clan is also from the Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shiite Islam that as a minority has dominated the Sunni majority since Assad first seized power in a 1970 coup.
Assassinations of the government’s supporters and opponents have previously taken place in embattled cities like Homs and Hama, but Damascus had been relatively quiet until recent weeks, when reports of skirmishing in some neighborhoods began to surface.
Violence between supporters and opponents of the Assad government also spread into northern Lebanon, where the Lebanese Army moved in to separate Sunni Muslim and Alawite neighborhoods after exchanges of gunfire erupted.
The fighting left two civilians dead and 27 people wounded, including 10 soldiers, said an army source, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to comment publicly.
Analysts have long feared that violence in Syria would reignite Lebanon’s sectarian tinderbox.
Renewed attempts to forge a diplomatic solution to the Syrian uprising are due to intensify starting Sunday. The Arab League is to meet in Cairo to weigh a number of steps ranging from a more aggressive humanitarian effort to recognizing the Syrian National Council in exile as an alternative government.
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