Beirut--The apparent disintegration of a key Syrian rebel group has dealt a major blow to US efforts to build up a force of moderate fighters to take on the Islamic State group.
The Hazm movement was seen as a cornerstone of the train-and-equip programme Washington hopes will bring thousands of non-extremist fighters to bear against IS in Syria.
But after suffering a devastating defeat at the hands of Al-Qaeda's Syrian affiliate at the weekend, Hazm appears to have disbanded, with many of its fighters reported to have joined an Islamist coalition.
"The collapse of... Hazm means that, in effect, there is no substantial and credible Western-backed 'moderate' opposition throughout most of Syria," intelligence consultancy The Soufan Group said in a brief.
Mainly present in Idlib and Aleppo provinces in northern Syria, the group, known in Arabic as Harakat Hazm, consisted of several thousand fighters and was last year cited by US Secretary of State John Kerry as likely to receive US arms and training.
Its creation was announced in January last year as a coalition of a dozen rebel groups from the Free Syrian Army that had taken up arms against President Bashar al-Assad.
It was the first rebel group to receive US-made TOW anti-tank missiles from Western backers in April.
In recent months it had been coming under increasing pressure from jihadist fighters including from Syrian Al-Qaeda affiliate the Al-Nusra Front, which has dislodged Hazm from several areas.
On Saturday, Nusra launched a major assault on Hazm's main operations centre -- Base 46 in Aleppo province -- which members of the group had seized from troops loyal to Assad in November 2012.
"Nusra kept pushing with heavy artillery and shelling for four to five hours," Louay Meqdad, head of the Research Centre for Free Syrian Army Affairs and former spokesman for the FSA, told AFP.
In one night alone, he said, 73 Hazm fighters were killed.
AFP
