Syria Live Coverage: Turkish Special Forces Enter the Country

1520 GMT: Fighting In Southwest Damascus. Reuters reports that despite rebel gains (described below) some of Assad's forces are well dug in, and have unleashed an intense rocket attack on Khan Alsheh:

An opposition campaigner in the nearby town of Jedeidet said troops stationed in hills overlooking Khan Sheih were attacking the area with multiple rocket launchers to try to dislodge rebels surrounding the barracks.

"I counted up to 20 explosions a minute on Khan Sheih," the activist, who uses the pseudonym of Abdo, told Reuters by phone.

A rebel commander in contact with the fighters said a force of some 1,000 insurgents had moved into Khan Sheih, which is 25 km from the Golan Heights, captured by Israel in 1967.

1508 GMT: Rebels Push Southwest of Damascus. A prominent microblogger finds a video of a recently captured base near the capital, the 1337th Regiment Air Defense Base (map):

Click to read more ...

Syria Live Coverage: The Bodies in Aleppo's "River of Martyrs"

2040 GMT: Large Rockets Fired Towards Central Damascus. In the last video we posted a video that shows the remains of a rocket that landed in Ein Tarma, a district in southern Damascus. Eliot Higgins and I have reviewed the image, and we are in agreement that what we are looking at matches the very unique tail end of a Frog-7 rocket. The picture on the left in the debris in Damascus, and the picture on the right is a Frog-7 on a truck launcher:

http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1064/868869014_d3b90b0505_o.jpg

The Frog-7 has a range of 70 kilometers, and has an average margin of error of 500-700 meters. Ein Tarma is only 1.2 kilometers by 800 meters, and is situated an alarming-close 2.7-3 kilometers from the very center of Damascus:

Click to read more ...