BEIRUT, Lebanon — President Bashar al-Assad fired his prime minister on Monday, Syria’s official media reported, in disputed circumstances that seemed a further indication of disarray among loyalists following a series of high-level defections and a rebel bomb attack last month that killed four of the Syrian leader’s closest security aides.
Prime Minister Riyad Farid Hijab had been in office for less than two months and activists said he had fled to Jordan with his family before the announcement of his dismissal was made, joining the growing ranks of high-ranking generals and others who have defected as the uprising turned to civil war.
His defection could not independently confirmed. The announcement of his resignation by Syria’s official media came hours after a bomb explosion was reported at a state television building in Damascus, the capital.
While the authorities sought to project an impression of control by announcing the minister’s dismissal, his departure — coupled with the blast at the television station — reinforced rebel suggestions that President Assad’s government was feeling strain as his adversaries step up their attacks and seem to gain momentum in the capital of Damascus and in Aleppo, Syria’s largest city.
Mr. Hijab had been in office only since June, when President Assad promoted him from his job as agriculture minster and ordered him to form a new administration. The Syrian government immediately announced a replacement for him on Monday -- Omar Ghalawanji, a longtime official with an engineering degree who had been deputy prime minister.
Syria’s information minister said the bombing at the television station, which did not knock the station off air, was insignificant.
“Nothing can silence the voice of Syria or the voice of the Syrian people,” said the minister, Omran al-Zoubi.
Still, the explosion near a busy rotary in central Damascus offered another sign of the rebels’ ability to breach state institutions.
On July 18, a bomb at the state security headquarters in Damascus killed four of Syria’s top military and security officials. In late June, gunmen stormed a pro-government television station in a suburb near Damascus, killing seven employees and destroying its studios with explosives, Syrian officials said at the time.
The latest attack, moreover, two days after rebels nearly gained control of the main television station in Aleppo, suggested that rebels are prioritizing control of information in their effort to topple the regime and attract international recognition.
“We welcome the defection,” said Mohammed Sarmini, a spokesman for the Syrian National Council, Syria’s main opposition group, based in Turkey. “It’s not the only one and there will be more. This is proof that the regime is collapsing.”
Independent journalists face a barrage of restrictions and other hurdles in covering the 17-month-old revolt, in which both sides have sought from the beginning to seize the narrative.
The propaganda contest has pitted Soviet-style state media — mainly a status television broadcast with a gray-haired host delivering upbeat pronouncements about the war against “terrorists” -- against young rebels and activists using the Internet to broadcast a steady flow of shaky, amateur video images whose provenance is sometimes unclear, fbut whose goal is clear: to show havoc caused by the Syrian government and to showcase the strength of rebel forces.
The opposing sides frequently offer directly opposed versions of the same events. On Sunday, for instances, videos uploaded by the opposition showed fighting in a neighborhood that the government said had been “cleaned.”
Also on Sunday, a group of Syrian rebels took responsibility on Sunday for the kidnapping of 48 Iranians in Damascus a day earlier, but the rebels insisted that their captives were members of Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards, not religious pilgrims as Iran’s official news agency had reported.
“They are Iranian thugs who were in Damascus for a field reconnaissance mission,” said a rebel leader, in a video that the rebels said showed the captives sitting calmly behind armed Syrian fighters. In the video, the rebels flipped through what they said were Iranian identification cards and certificates for carrying weapons, proving, the rebels said, that the hostages were not religious pilgrims.
The identities and motives of the captives could not be independently verified, and some rebel groups have not embraced the kidnapping or the theory laid out by the fighters in the video. Col. Malik al-Kurdi, a deputy commander of the Free Syrian Army — one of several competing umbrella groups involved in the fighting — said the brigade taking responsibility for the kidnapping appeared to have been acting on its own and did not tell the Free Syrian Army about the operation.
Iranian officials said the kidnapped Iranians were pilgrims, denying that any of them were members of the Revolutionary Guards, Iran’s Arabic-language channel Al Alam reported Sunday, quoting an unnamed government spokesman. On Saturday, Iran’s foreign minister, Ali Akbar Salehi, contacted the Syrian and Turkish foreign ministries, asking them to secure the release of the 48 Iranians.
In a statement, the Iranian Embassy in Damascus said that the abducted Iranians had traveled to Syria using a “private” tour company for a pilgrimage to the Shiite shrine of Sayyida Zeinab in the southeastern suburbs of Damascus, which is a mile or two from where fierce fighting has been raging in the neighborhood of Tadamon. While the video clip of the abducted Iranians showed only men, Iranian state news media said that women and children were also among those taken by the Syrian rebels.
For the rebels, the hostages offered an opportunity to broadcast their belief that the government of President Assad was on its way out and to argue that Iran and other foreign supporters of the Syrian government should reconsider their allegiances.
The rebels also warned that Iranians who helped the Assad government would face the same fate: they will end up “dead or as hostages.”
The kidnapping and the intensified fighting on Sunday in both Damascus, the capital, and Aleppo, where rebels and reporters inside the city said that Syrian jets were dropping bombs, were further indications of what analysts described as a widening war.
Underscoring the worsening security and diplomatic impasse, a spokeswoman for Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton announced Sunday that Mrs. Clinton would travel to Turkey this week for previously unscheduled meetings with Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and other Turkish leaders to discuss the situation in Syria. Mrs. Clinton, who is in the middle of a multination trip in Africa, is also expected to meet Syrian opposition leaders as part of international efforts to intensify pressure on Mr. Assad’s government.
Also, the leader of Syria’s main political opposition group, Abdelbasset Sida of the Syrian National Council, said that he would negotiate with government officials whose hands were not “stained with blood” after Mr. Assad and his government were out of power.
His comments appeared in an interview published Sunday in Asharq al-Awsat, a pan-Arab newspaper, less than a week after the United Nations and Arab League special envoy for Syria, Kofi Annan, resigned because of a lack of diplomatic progress.
In the latest of the high-ranking defections from Syria, the country’s first man in space has fled to Turkey and joined the opposition to Mr. Assad, Turkey’s state-run news agency reported Sunday. The defector, Mohammad Ahmad Faris, 61, an air force pilot, was part of the three-man crew of a Soviet space mission in 1987, the news agency said, according to The Associated Press.
An employee of The New York Times contributed reporting from Aleppo, Syria, Thomas Erdbrink from Tehran, Steven Lee Myers from Washington, and Alan Cowell from London.
Prime Minister Riyad Farid Hijab had been in office for less than two months and activists said he had fled to Jordan with his family before the announcement of his dismissal was made, joining the growing ranks of high-ranking generals and others who have defected as the uprising turned to civil war.
His defection could not independently confirmed. The announcement of his resignation by Syria’s official media came hours after a bomb explosion was reported at a state television building in Damascus, the capital.
While the authorities sought to project an impression of control by announcing the minister’s dismissal, his departure — coupled with the blast at the television station — reinforced rebel suggestions that President Assad’s government was feeling strain as his adversaries step up their attacks and seem to gain momentum in the capital of Damascus and in Aleppo, Syria’s largest city.
Mr. Hijab had been in office only since June, when President Assad promoted him from his job as agriculture minster and ordered him to form a new administration. The Syrian government immediately announced a replacement for him on Monday -- Omar Ghalawanji, a longtime official with an engineering degree who had been deputy prime minister.
Syria’s information minister said the bombing at the television station, which did not knock the station off air, was insignificant.
“Nothing can silence the voice of Syria or the voice of the Syrian people,” said the minister, Omran al-Zoubi.
Still, the explosion near a busy rotary in central Damascus offered another sign of the rebels’ ability to breach state institutions.
On July 18, a bomb at the state security headquarters in Damascus killed four of Syria’s top military and security officials. In late June, gunmen stormed a pro-government television station in a suburb near Damascus, killing seven employees and destroying its studios with explosives, Syrian officials said at the time.
The latest attack, moreover, two days after rebels nearly gained control of the main television station in Aleppo, suggested that rebels are prioritizing control of information in their effort to topple the regime and attract international recognition.
“We welcome the defection,” said Mohammed Sarmini, a spokesman for the Syrian National Council, Syria’s main opposition group, based in Turkey. “It’s not the only one and there will be more. This is proof that the regime is collapsing.”
Independent journalists face a barrage of restrictions and other hurdles in covering the 17-month-old revolt, in which both sides have sought from the beginning to seize the narrative.
The propaganda contest has pitted Soviet-style state media — mainly a status television broadcast with a gray-haired host delivering upbeat pronouncements about the war against “terrorists” -- against young rebels and activists using the Internet to broadcast a steady flow of shaky, amateur video images whose provenance is sometimes unclear, fbut whose goal is clear: to show havoc caused by the Syrian government and to showcase the strength of rebel forces.
The opposing sides frequently offer directly opposed versions of the same events. On Sunday, for instances, videos uploaded by the opposition showed fighting in a neighborhood that the government said had been “cleaned.”
Also on Sunday, a group of Syrian rebels took responsibility on Sunday for the kidnapping of 48 Iranians in Damascus a day earlier, but the rebels insisted that their captives were members of Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards, not religious pilgrims as Iran’s official news agency had reported.
“They are Iranian thugs who were in Damascus for a field reconnaissance mission,” said a rebel leader, in a video that the rebels said showed the captives sitting calmly behind armed Syrian fighters. In the video, the rebels flipped through what they said were Iranian identification cards and certificates for carrying weapons, proving, the rebels said, that the hostages were not religious pilgrims.
The identities and motives of the captives could not be independently verified, and some rebel groups have not embraced the kidnapping or the theory laid out by the fighters in the video. Col. Malik al-Kurdi, a deputy commander of the Free Syrian Army — one of several competing umbrella groups involved in the fighting — said the brigade taking responsibility for the kidnapping appeared to have been acting on its own and did not tell the Free Syrian Army about the operation.
Iranian officials said the kidnapped Iranians were pilgrims, denying that any of them were members of the Revolutionary Guards, Iran’s Arabic-language channel Al Alam reported Sunday, quoting an unnamed government spokesman. On Saturday, Iran’s foreign minister, Ali Akbar Salehi, contacted the Syrian and Turkish foreign ministries, asking them to secure the release of the 48 Iranians.
In a statement, the Iranian Embassy in Damascus said that the abducted Iranians had traveled to Syria using a “private” tour company for a pilgrimage to the Shiite shrine of Sayyida Zeinab in the southeastern suburbs of Damascus, which is a mile or two from where fierce fighting has been raging in the neighborhood of Tadamon. While the video clip of the abducted Iranians showed only men, Iranian state news media said that women and children were also among those taken by the Syrian rebels.
For the rebels, the hostages offered an opportunity to broadcast their belief that the government of President Assad was on its way out and to argue that Iran and other foreign supporters of the Syrian government should reconsider their allegiances.
The rebels also warned that Iranians who helped the Assad government would face the same fate: they will end up “dead or as hostages.”
The kidnapping and the intensified fighting on Sunday in both Damascus, the capital, and Aleppo, where rebels and reporters inside the city said that Syrian jets were dropping bombs, were further indications of what analysts described as a widening war.
Underscoring the worsening security and diplomatic impasse, a spokeswoman for Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton announced Sunday that Mrs. Clinton would travel to Turkey this week for previously unscheduled meetings with Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and other Turkish leaders to discuss the situation in Syria. Mrs. Clinton, who is in the middle of a multination trip in Africa, is also expected to meet Syrian opposition leaders as part of international efforts to intensify pressure on Mr. Assad’s government.
Also, the leader of Syria’s main political opposition group, Abdelbasset Sida of the Syrian National Council, said that he would negotiate with government officials whose hands were not “stained with blood” after Mr. Assad and his government were out of power.
His comments appeared in an interview published Sunday in Asharq al-Awsat, a pan-Arab newspaper, less than a week after the United Nations and Arab League special envoy for Syria, Kofi Annan, resigned because of a lack of diplomatic progress.
In the latest of the high-ranking defections from Syria, the country’s first man in space has fled to Turkey and joined the opposition to Mr. Assad, Turkey’s state-run news agency reported Sunday. The defector, Mohammad Ahmad Faris, 61, an air force pilot, was part of the three-man crew of a Soviet space mission in 1987, the news agency said, according to The Associated Press.
An employee of The New York Times contributed reporting from Aleppo, Syria, Thomas Erdbrink from Tehran, Steven Lee Myers from Washington, and Alan Cowell from London.