Mortar rounds hit an upscale district of Damascus today as Syrian state TV broadcast images of President Bashar Assad attending prayers in the capital to mark the start of a Muslim holiday.
It was the Syrian leader's third public appearance in over a week as his regime tries to capitalise on recent gains on the battlefield against rebels fighting to oust him from power.
Syrian government troops yesterday ambushed a large group of rebels trudging through a desert road northeast of Damascus, killing more than 60 fighters.
In the state TV broadcast, Assad, dressed in a suit, was seen praying in a mosque alongside Syria's grand mufti at the start of Eid al-Fitr, the three-day holiday that ends the holy month of Ramadan.
The TV said Assad attended prayers in the Anas bin Malik Mosque in Damascus early today.
The Britain-based Observatory for Human Rights said three mortar rounds hit the capital's district of Malki early in the morning. The neighborhood has rarely been targeted by opposition forces during the conflict, which last year brought the rebels and their battle to the heart of the capital.
There were no immediate reports of casualties or damage in the shelling.
Assad's troops have recently been on the offensive in central Syria, making advances near the border with Lebanon and in the city of Homs, an opposition stronghold and Syria's third largest city.
In the north, where much of the territory has been under opposition control in the past year, rebels scored a rare victory earlier this week when they captured a major air base in the Aleppo province near the border with Turkey.
Syria's crisis started as a largely peaceful uprising against Assad's rule in March 2011. It turned into a civil war after opposition supporters took up arms to fight a brutal government crackdown. More than 100,000 people have been killed in the violence so far, according to UN figures.
