FIAT DEALERS GARAGES

Residents in southern Damascus reported a shell landing in southern areas of the capital every minute.

After a major assault on rebels in Damascus last week, the army has turned to Aleppo, reinforcing troops there with an armored column that had been operating in a northern province.

Fierce clashes raged in the early hours in Aleppo, and an activist said rebels now controlled half of Syria's commercial capital, a claim that could not be independently verified.

"There was shelling this morning on the Salaheddine and Mashhad districts," said Aleppo activist Abu Hisham. "Now it stopped, but helicopters are buzzing overhead."

Activists said 24 people were killed in fighting in and around Aleppo on Wednesday, swelling a national death toll of about 18,000 since the revolt against Assad began 16 months ago.

In the Syrian capital, a resident in the Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp reported heavy shelling, particularly near the southern Hajar al-Aswad district.

She said the army seemed to be targeting sites on the edges of the camp, firing shells every minute. The bombardment started around 7 a.m. (0400 GMT) and was still going three hours later.

As hostilities have intensified in the north, in and around Aleppo, Turkey closed its border posts to commercial traffic on Wednesday, but not to refugees fleeing Syria.

BATTLE FOR THE CITIES

The revolt against Assad has developed from an insurgency in the provinces into a battle for control of the two main cities, Aleppo and Damascus, where fighting exploded last week.

Assad's forces have launched big counter-assaults in both cities. They appear to have beaten rebels back from neighborhoods in the capital and are attacking Aleppo.

At the Syrian town of Azaz, a few miles south of the Turkish border, rebels appeared in control after heavy clashes over the past month in which they succeeded in driving government forces out of what had become a rubble-strewn ghost town.

The conflict has left Azaz in ruins, a Reuters correspondent who visited the town said. Burnt-out armored personnel carriers sat on the roads where rebels had hit them with rocket-propelled grenades. Bullet casings were scattered everywhere.

Most residents fled during the latest fighting, which pushed Assad's forces out over the past month and ended in the rebels taking the Bab al-Salam border crossing with Turkey on Sunday.

The struggle for Aleppo could prompt an exodus across the Turkish border, where some Syrian refugees are already complaining about poor conditions in camps and have clashed with riot police in disputes over food and other issues this week.

"There is not enough food. They have broken our hearts, the Turks. Why are they doing this to us?" said a sobbing woman called Umm Omar, with her four children huddled next to her in a camp near the border.

In its most recent comment on the fighting, state-run Syrian television said on Wednesday that government troops were imposing security and stability in and around Aleppo.

"The terrorists are suffering terrible losses. Groups of them are throwing their weapons away and giving themselves up. Others are fleeing for the Turkish border," the television said.

Military experts believe an overstretched Syrian army is pulling back to concentrate on fighting insurgents in Aleppo and Damascus, important power centers for the government, while leaving outlying areas in the hands of rebels.

The uprising has entered a more violent phase in the past 10 days since rebels poured into Damascus in large numbers.

On July 18, an explosion killed four members of Assad's inner circle inside a security headquarters, a blow that wiped out much of the top echelon of his military command structure and shattered the reputation for invulnerability that his family has held since his father seized power in a coup in 1970.

WESTERN POWERS

Western powers have been calling for Assad to be removed from office for months, but they fear that he will fight to the end, raising the risk of sectarian warfare spreading across one of the world's most volatile regions.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, addressing the Bosnian parliament in Sarajevo, said the world must unite to end the "slaughter" in Syria, recalling the inertia of the United Nations in 1995 during the Srebrenica massacre in Bosnia.

At the U.N. Security Council, members blamed each other for rising violence in Syria. Western states pledged to seek an end to the conflict outside the world body, while Russia warned of "likely catastrophic consequences" with that approach.

Russia, an ally of Syria, and China have repeatedly blocked Western-backed Security Council resolutions on Syria.

As the revolt against Assad intensifies, more Syrian officials have abandoned their posts. Syria's ambassador to the United Arab Emirates and his wife, who is Damascus's envoy to Cyprus, defected on Wednesday.

A military attaché at the Syrian embassy in Oman told Al Jazeera television he had also defected. "After the killing and bombardment and destruction of our people in Syria increased, and the massacres took place, this ... pushed me to defect from this regime," Mohammad Tahseen al-Faqir said.

(Writing by Giles Elgood; Editing by Alistair Lyon)

People with knowledge of the situation had earlier said the resignations of Watanabe and his top lieutenant, Takumi Shibata, were approved at a board meeting on Thursday morning.

The departure of the architects of Nomura's takeover of the Asian and European assets of Lehman Brothers raises questions about the future of the global expansion strategy they pursued.

Nomura has not confirmed the moves, but said it would hold a news conference at 05.00 a.m. EDT on its management structure and to give an update on its internal investigation into leaks of insider information to clients of its securities unit in 2010.

Nagai, a three-decade company veteran, took over that unit in April as part of a management reshuffle. Shibata will be replaced as chief operating officer by Atsushi Yoshikawa, the head of its U.S. operations.

Nomura's shake-up comes a month after the bank cut pay for both of its top executives in response to the third insider trading scandal since Watanabe, who joined the bank in 1975, took the helm four years ago.

"When you look at their history, the number of scandals, this was the last straw," said Jim Sinegal, an analyst with Morningstar research house.

Investors reacted positively, bidding Nomura shares up nearly 6 percent ahead of its fiscal first quarter earnings, which saw the bank report a net profit of 1.89 billion yen ($24.2 million), against a profit of 17.7 billion yen in the same period last year. The consensus of eight analysts was for a profit of 500 million yen. Earnings were hit by slumping mutual fund sales and stock trading commissions.

At the start of a news briefing on the results, CFO Junko Nakagawa apologized for the insider trading scandal and promised to bolster internal controls. She and three other executives bowed in apology.

"I can't say that there is no impact on our earnings," she said. "It is difficult at this stage to numerically estimate the possible damage. All we want to do is make efforts to regain trust."

AT LOGGERHEADS WITH REGULATORS

Nagai joined Nomura in 1981 after graduating from the law department of Chuo University. He gained experience in both retail and corporate banking as he rose up the ranks to co-chief operating officer (COO) of Nomura Securities last year.

The resignation of Watanabe, 59, had been expected by many inside Nomura since signs emerged that the bank's leadership was at loggerheads with Japan's financial regulators, which accused Nomura of being slow to respond to an investigation into insider trading practices that had grown rampant in the Tokyo market.

The turmoil comes as the industry globally finds itself under huge financial and regulatory pressure.

Investment banks have been hammered both by falling trading and advisory income as clients pull back from markets due to the euro zone debt crisis, and by political calls for a change in their culture after a string of scandals, most recently over the fixing of interest rate benchmarks.

Watanabe and Shibata, Nomura's chief operating officer, oversaw the troubled 2008 attempt to absorb assets of failed U.S. bank Lehman Brothers and a key question for their successors will be whether to follow their ambitious plans for worldwide expansion.

That strategy was dealt a blow earlier this year with the abrupt departure of Jasjit Bhattal, Lehman's former Asia Pacific CEO who helped broker the deal, and who had been seen as a possible successor to Watanabe.

Global rivals Goldman Sachs (GS.N) and Credit Suisse Group (CSGN.VX) twinned their quarterly reports with additional restructuring, but Nakagawa said Nomura had no plans for additional cost cuts on top of the $1.2 billion savings drive launched last year.

Moody's Investors Service cut its debt rating on Nomura to one notch above speculative or "junk" grade in March, citing concerns about the long-term profitability of its overseas operations.

Nomura booked a pretax loss of 12.1 billion yen in the latest quarter overseas, but that was about half the loss in the previous quarter - suggesting the cost-cutting plan is starting to bear some fruit.

INSIDE TIPS

The scandal that brought down the bank's leaders dates back to 2010. Nomura has confirmed it was the source of leaks on planned share offerings by energy firm Inpex (1605.T), Mizuho Financial Group (8411.T) and Tokyo Electric Power (9501.T).

In all three cases, employees in its institutional sales department provided the tip-offs.

A panel of attorneys brought in by Nomura to investigate the insider trading cases said it found equity sales staff would regularly pump colleagues for inside information about upcoming stock offerings and then share tips with investors.

Watanabe's decision to step down was welcomed by Tsutomu Okubo, the lead director of a ruling Democratic Party of Japan committee that has been crafting stronger insider trading rules.

"I applaud Watanabe's resignation from the perspective that it is aimed at leading to a reform of the securities industry," Okubo told reporters.

Nomura, Japan's largest brokerage, is awaiting possible sanctions from Japan's Financial Services Agency but the scandal has already cost it clients.

Some asset managers have stopped trading with the firm to meet their own compliance rules and it has lost underwriting business, including being left off the government's sale of $6 billion worth of Japan Tobacco (2914.T) shares.

Shares of Nomura have fallen in value by more than a third since the first insider trading case emerged in March. That compares with a 10 percent fall in the Japanese securities sub-index .IFINS.T during the same period.

Scandals have forced Nomura to change executive leadership twice since the collapse of Japan's asset bubble. In 1991, then-President Yoshihisa Tabuchi resigned after the brokerage admitted to compensating favored clients for stock losses.

In 1997, President Hideo Sakamaki stepped down after the bank was found to have channeled more than $3 million to a gangster in order to keep him from raising trouble at its 1995 shareholder meeting.

(Additional reporting by Mayumi Negishi and Jochelle Mendonca; Writing by Kevin Krolicki in Tokyo and Alex Richardson in Singapore; Editing by Dean Yates)