Civilians search for casualties under rubble at a site hit by an air strike by forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar Al Assad in Maaret Al Naaman town in Idlib.
BEIRUT: Fighting for a key military base outside Syria’s main northern city of Aleppo killed at least 15 pro-regime militiamen yesterday, a monitoring group said.
“Fifteen members of the National Defence Forces were killed in fighting against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, Al Nusra Front and Islamist groups in the east of Aleppo province and near Base 80,” the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
Both ISIL and Al Nusra are loyal to Al Qaeda and have played a major role in operations on the ground, to the concern of the opposition’s Western supporters.
The army recaptured Base 80, which had provided the garrison for Aleppo’s military and civilian airports, at the weekend after months of fighting.
It was one of a series of setbacks for the rebels in recent weeks around Syria’s main cities of Damascus and Aleppo.
North of the capital on Wednesday, fighting raged in the Qalamoun mountains near the Lebanese border, where a flare-up of violence has sparked a new exodus of refugees.
The mixed Christian-Sunni Muslim area is strategic because it provides a key supply line for rebels around both Damascus and the third city of Homs to its north.
“The humanitarian situation is very bad,” an opposition activist in the area said over the Internet.
“Because of the density of the population here, we fear a real catastrophe.”
A Syrian military source said there had been fighting in the Qalamoun town of Deir Attiyeh with rebel fighters who had fled the army’s recapture this week of nearby Qara.
Troops, meanwhile, pressed an offensive against the last rebel-held districts of Homs. At least 18 people were killed in exchanges of shellfire in the central city, the Observatory said.
The dead included two members of the mukhabarat, the regime secret services, it said.
The SANA state news agency reported that six people in Damascus were wounded yesterday by shells fired by “terrorists”, the regime term for the armed opposition.
According to an audio message posted yesterday on the Internet, an Al Qaeda front group fighting in Iraq and Syria has called for jihadist groups to join forces under its banner.
In remarks purportedly made by Abu Mohammed Al Adnani, the ISIL spokesman said militant groups should close ranks against Syrian President Bashar Al Assad.
“We call for all jihadist leaders and soldiers and people to accelerate in joining the project of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant,” Adnani said.
AFP
