Syrian regime controls 85% of country, says Russia
ALEPPO: Russia’s military said on Tuesday that Syrian regime forces have liberated about 85 percent of the country’s territory from militants, a major turnaround two years after Moscow intervened to lend a hand to its embattled long-time ally.
Russia has been providing air cover for President Bashar Assad’s troops since 2015, changing the tide of the war and giving Syrian and allied troops an advantage over opposition fighters and Daesh terrorists.
Speaking to reporters at the Hemeimeem air base in Syria’s province of Latakia, Lt. Gen. Alexander Lapin said the Syrian regime still must clear the militants who hold around 27,000 sq. km, the remaining 15 percent.
The reporters were later flown to Aleppo city, which opposition fighters lost to the Syrian regime in late 2016, and where Russian military police patrol parts of the city.
Syrian troops, along with strong support from Iranian-backed ground fighters, have in recent weeks pushed Daesh militants out of central Homs province, near the border with Lebanon, and are now fighting them in the oilrich Deir Ezzor province in the east.
Deir Ezzor is the last major Daesh holdout in Syria and the Syrian campaign, backed by Russian air power, broke a nearly three-yearold siege on the provincial capital where troops had been encircled by Daesh militants.
But activists said civilians are bearing the brunt of the offensive amid intensive airstrikes and Daesh taking them as human shields. An airstrike hit recently displaced Syrians from Deir Ezzor on the western side of the Euphrates River, killing at least eight civilians.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights and Omar Abu Laila, who runs a group that monitors developments in Deir Ezzor, said the airstrikes were suspected to be from Russian aircraft.
The Syrian regime’s ally Hezbollah declared victory in the Syrian war and the group’s leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah dismissed the fighting left to be done in the country as “scattered battles.”
“We have won in the war (in Syria),” he said in comments reported by the Lebanese newspaper Al-Akhbar.
At the height of its strength, Daesh controlled nearly half of Syria, seizing mostly territories in the east and north of Syria.
Around Syria, there are still pockets of other insurgents, some backed by Turkey and others by the US, in the northwest and north as well as in the south and near the capital. Militants affiliated with Al-Qaeda control Idlib province, near the border with Turkey.
Russian air power has been instrumental in recent Syrian military successes. With Damascus facing major battlefield defeats, Moscow signed a deal with the Syrian government in August 2015 to deploy an air force contingent and other military assets at the Hemeimeem base, in the heartland of Assad’s Alawite religious minority.