Syria Says It Won’t Use Chemical Arms to Stop Rebellion

With street battles still flaring in Syria’s two main cities, the Syrian government said on Monday that its forces would never use chemical weapons in its domestic conflict, describing them as outside the bounds of the kind of guerrilla warfare they are fighting.

Jihad Makdissi, the Foreign Ministry spokesman, read a statement at a news conference in Damascus addressing repeated questions about Syria’s chemical weapons that have arisen in recent days. The Syrian army has all stocks of such weapons under secure guard and would use them only in case of an external attack, he said.

“They will not be used against Syrian civilians,” Mr. Makdissi said. “They will never be used domestically no matter how this crisis evolves. Those weapons will only be used in the case of exterior aggression.”

The Syrians were evidently taking a lesson from Iraq, where accusations of a chemical weapons stockpile was among the reasons used to justify the March 2003 American invasion. The Iraqi stockpile never materialized.

Mr. Makdissi said all the attention focused on the chemical weapons — also referred to as weapons of mass destruction — “aims to justify and prepare the international community’s military intervention in Syria under the false pretext of W.M.D.”

Syria is facing “gang warfare” in its main cities where the weapons could not be used, the Foreign Ministry spokesman said, and it is ultimately a military decision of when to deploy them should Syria be attacked from abroad.

His comments came as the European Union foreign ministers, meeting in Brussels, voted to toughen sanctions against supporters of the country’s president, Bashar al-Assad, and to require the 27 member nations to search airplanes and ships suspected of carrying weapons or banned equipment into Syria, where fighting has raged in the country’s main cities for days.

Rebel commanders in the northern Syrian city of Aleppo vowed Sunday to liberate it from government control as intense street battles there entered a third day.

But as the fighting appeared to be spreading in Aleppo, skirmishes in Damascus petered out on Sunday as large numbers of government troops were deployed to shut down the rebels in one neighborhood after another where they had gained footholds last week.

“We have cleared Qaboun of terrorists, and now we are going to finish them off in other sections of Damascus and beyond,” said one soldier wearing camouflage fatigues who was interviewed on Syrian state television.

The television report and videos posted by activists from Qaboun, a northeastern suburb of the capital, reflected a situation similar to that reported in several other Damascus neighborhoods where fighting erupted last week.

State television showed deserted streets strewn with rubble and an occasional body rotting in the sun, and video from Qaboun showed asphalt streets torn up by the tracks of armored vehicles. Opposition activists said the government used tanks, artillery and rockets fired from helicopters to subdue various areas.

Fighting apparently still flared on Sunday in parts of Mezze, a western neighborhood, where videos on YouTube showed columns of smoke rising.

But Syrian government television sought to portray life in the capital as returning to normal, highlighting video from the Midan area, a battleground last week, where cleanup crews were seen wielding brooms and happy citizens heard declaring that the bakery was selling bread again.

Another report by Syrian television featured interviews with people from a neighborhood where it said that citizens had asked the army to intervene. They thanked God that they no longer had to “live in fear,” now that the terrorists — the government’s usual term for its opponents — had been chased away and “security restored.”

The lengthy report said the Syrian army was winning the battle on many fronts, including Damascus, Hama, Homs and other cities, because of the army’s “long experience confronting terrorism and imperialism.”