Turkey to repel Syrian forces

TURKEY plans to push Syrian government forces away from its military observation posts in north-west Syria’s Idlib region this week, President Tayyip Erdogan said yesterday, despite continued advances by Damascus’s Russian-backed military.

Nearly 1 million Syrians have been displaced in the past three months by fighting between Turkish-backed rebels and Syrian forces trying to recapture the last major insurgent-held region in Syria after nine years of war.

Ankara has sent thousands of troops and truckloads of equipment into the region, in Syria’s north-west corner bordering Turkey, to support the rebels and Erdogan has vowed to push back Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s forces.

“We are planning to liberate our observation posts from the surrounding (Syrian government forces) by the end of this month, one way or another,” Erdogan told his party’s lawmakers in a speech.

But Assad’s forces made fresh gains in southern Idlib province where they took a number of villages yesterday, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a war monitor, and a military news outlet run by Assad’s Lebanese ally Hezbollah.

The pro-government forces’ immediate objective is to reach the town of Kafar Aweed, the capture of which would force rebels to withdraw from a wider tract of territory including their last remaining foothold in Hama province, Observatory Director Rami Abdulrahman said. The Syrian army said it had seized numerous villages and towns in the past few days in the south of Idlib province.|