DAMASCUS: Forces loyal to President Bashar Al Assad have now seized all of the Qusayr area in central Syria, state television claimed yesterday, as wounded rebels and scores of refugee families straggled into Lebanon.
The seizure of Eastern Buweida village, the last rebel bastion in the area, brought the entire Qusayr region near the border with Lebanon back under regime control. It came four days after the town of Qusayr, which had been in insurgent hands for a year, fell to the army and forces from Lebanon’s powerful Shia Hezbollah movement.
Hundreds of people who fled the fall of Qusayr took refuge in Eastern Bweida, 14km to the northeast, but Syrian state television broadcast footage of a desolate village devoid of signs of life. It was not immediately known where all the people had gone, but some have crossed the border into Lebanon.
Hezbollah also announced the news of Eastern Bweida’s fall on its own television channel Al-Manar. Its correspondent said: “Qusayr’s countryside is finished... The army has taken back the whole Qusayr region. The regime “staged a war of nerves by bombarding (Eastern Bweida) all night long. We have entered a new phase.”
The army and Hezbollah launched a vast offensive on Qusayr nearly three weeks ago, in the clearest sign yet of the Lebanese group’s commitment to the Assad regime. Scores of fighters were killed on both sides. Qusayr, only 10km from Lebanon, is strategic for the regime because of its proximity to the border and because it lies on a route linking Damascus to the coast.
For the rebels, it was an important conduit from Lebanon for men and materiel. Dozens of Syrians and Lebanese from the rebel side wounded in the battle for Qusayr have been evacuated to Arsal, a border town in northern Lebanon, and to Baalbek in the east, security officials said.
At the same time, scores of families fleeing the area have also braved a dangerous journey to safety in Arsal, a local official said. “Their situation is very bad. They arrived exhausted. They have nothing. Some came here on foot,” local official Ahmad Al Hojeiri said, adding that local authorities were short of funds and “only managing to provide basic assistance.”
Elsewhere, a car bombing near an army post in nearby Homs city killed at least seven people, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
After Qusayr fell, regime forces were expected to turn their sights on Homs, the countryside around Damascus and the northern province of Aleppo.
AFP
