Shells fired from Syria hit a Turkish border town over the weekend, in the first cross-border shelling incident since Ankara requested that Nato deploy Patriot air defence missiles on its frontier.
A rebel sniper aims at a Syrian army position on the outskirts of Aleppo, Syria Photo: AP
By Ruth Sherlock, Beirut
5:32PM GMT 02 Dec 2012
Artillery hit the Turkish border town of Reyhanli on Saturday evening amid clashes between President Bashar al-Assad's troops and rebels around the nearby Bab al-Hawa border post, Turkey's state-run Anatolia news agency reported.
Nato foreign ministers meeting in Brussels on Tuesday and Wednesday are expected to signal support for Turkey by giving the go-ahead to deploy the missiles, diplomatic sources in Brussels said.
Turkish officials and senior Syrian military defectors have repeatedly alleged in interviews that Mr Assad may resort to using the country's large chemical weapons arsenal if he felt he was losing his grip on power.
Syria is believed to have large stocks of Mustard and Sarin nerve gas that could be deployed against opposition areas with devastating effect. With the fighting now so close to the Turkish borders there are fears that they might spill across. The Patriot missiles would detect any missiles crossing the frontier.
The New York Times reported that western intelligence officials had spotted new signs of activity around Syrian military sites where chemical weapons are stored.
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A senior US official was quoted as saying: "They're doing some things that suggest they intend to use the weapons. It's not just moving stuff around. These are different kind of activities."
Separately a massive car bomb detonated in the Syrian city of Homs on Sunday, according to Syrian state television and opposition sources, with as many as 15 people killed.
"The Hamra neighbourhood has been under regime control throughout the revolt," Observatory director Rami Abdel Rahman told AFP. "The blast hit an area where there is a large vegetable market. The closest checkpoint is some 500 metres (yards) away."
Amateur video footage posted online by opposition activists showed the bodies of at least three victims, including a woman buried in the rubble of a building as a car burned not far away. Homs was one of the cradles of the armed uprising against the rule of President Bashar al-Assad, and has been declared the "capital of the revolution" by opposition activists.
The city suffered devastating violence early this year and has existed in a tense stalemate for the past six months, Syrian government forces keeping rebel held-areas under siege but unable to win back control.
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