Regime forces press advantage in Syria’s last rebel strongholds
Syrian government forces have increased pressure on two of the last opposition bastions in the country, with heavy air strikes on Idlib province and a move to break a siege on an army base near Damascus.
Syrian and Russian aircraft pressed on with a week-old operation targeting Idlib in the north-west, the last province in the country not under government control.
Raids on Sunday in the southeast of Idlib killed at least 21 people, including eight children and 11 members of the same family, said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
“Regime and Russian strikes are continuing today on several parts of Idlib,” Observatory head Rami Abdel Rahman said yesterday.
Russian-backed government forces launched an operation on the edge of the province in the closing days of last year and have retaken villages every day since.
Since the collapse of ISIL’s hold on territory in Syria and Iraq late last year, Syrian president Bashar Al Assad’s government has been focused on restoring its control over the country.
Idlib province, which borders Turkey, is almost entirely controlled by opposition forces that are dominated by an alliance named Hayat Tahrir Al Sham, which consists mostly of fighters from Jabhat Fatah Al Sham, Al Qaeda’s former affiliate in Syria.
Among the other opposition fighters in the province are thousands of extremists from Central Asian states and members of the Muslim Uighur ethnic minority of China’s Xinjiang province.
An explosion on Sunday in the city of Idlib at a base for the group Ajnad Al Qawqaz, made up of fighters from the Caucasus who operate alongside Hayat Tahrir, killed at least 34 people, including 19 civilians.
Mr Abdel Rahman said the death toll could yet rise, because more victims were believed to be buried, while many of the wounded were in critical condition. It was not clear whether the blast was caused by air strikes or was the result of internal clashes that sometimes break out between extremists and other opposition factions.
After shrinking to barely a sixth of the country at the height of the nearly seven-year conflict, the areas under government control now cover more than half of Syria’s territory. Another pocket where rebels are still holding out is Eastern Ghouta, a semi-rural area east of Damascus, and home to about 400,000 people.
Opposition fighters led by the Jaish Al Islam group had in recent days surrounded the army’s only military base in the area, but the government said yesterday that the siege had been broken.
“Units from the Syrian Arab Army have brought an end to the encirclement of the armoured vehicles base in Harasta,” it said, adding that operations were continuing to fully secure the base.
The shelling and bombardment of besieged Ghouta, where humanitarian conditions have sharply deteriorated, has also taken a heavy toll on civilians.
The latest casualties came yesterday when air strikes killed a child and two other civilians in Madeira, a village in Eastern Ghouta.