AL ASSAD’S STRIKES ON IDLIB RAISE FEARS FOR CIVILIANS

▶ Attacks erode demilitarised zone deal negotiated by Russia and Turkey

The Syrian government has attacked a demilitarised zone in the country’s last rebel-held province, undermining an agreement reached in September between regime ally Russia and rebel backer Turkey in an attempt to spare the populous region a full-out military assault.

Syria’s northern Idlib province, home to about 3.5 million people, including more than one million internally displaced persons, has been under threat of a full-scale military assault by pro-government forces since at least September, after sweeping government victories in which loyalists of President Bashar Assad retook a string of territories formerly held by either militants or opposition forces.

The Syrian government is estimated to be in control of 60 per cent of Syria. The rest of the country is held by US-backed Kurdish forces, with the exception of Syria’s north, which is the main bastion of rival opposition forces, including Al Qaeda-linked groups and Ankara-backed rebels, who command a buffer zone along Turkey’s border.

The Syrian army on Saturday shelled parts of southern and eastern Idlib, according to the Edlib Media Centre, an activist-run war monitor.

The UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said that government attacks also targeted adjacent territory in northern Hama province.

At least one woman and a child were killed and at least two children were wounded in Saturday’s shelling on Idlib and Hama, the Observatory said. Saturday’s casualties bring the number of people killed by government shelling on the demilitarised zone to 102 since October, the monitoring group said.

“The regime’s violations have been ongoing since the beginning of the Sochi deal,” Naji Abu Huzaifah, a spokesman for the National Liberation Front, a Turkish-backed coalition of rebel fighters, told The National. “This shows that the regime doesn’t want this agreement, from the beginning until today. They’re trying to end this agreement.”

EMC head Obeida Fadel said that government attacks had mainly targeted Idlib’s southeast. He described the offences as sporadic and said that shelling was accompanied by small infiltration attempts by government forces in areas adjacent to southern Idlib.

The government, however, has not resumed air strikes.

Mr Fadel also said that attacks were intended to undermine the Russian-Turkish agreement, which the Syrian government has criticised repeatedly in recent weeks.

The Syrian government last month said Turkey was not meeting its obligations under the deal, brokered in the Russian resort city of Sochi in September.

Under the agreement, Turkey had pledged to drive out Al Qaeda-inspired jihadists from the zone.

Syria’s Foreign Minister Walid Al Moualem said that continued militant operations in the demilitarised zone, despite the expiry of a deadline for them to withdraw, was a sign that Turkey had failed to uphold its end of the agreement.

Hayat Tahrir Al Sham, an alliance of militants that includes Al Qaeda’s former affiliate in Syria, is believed to be still operating in the area.

Meanwhile, Syria’s state-run Sana news agency said that Saturday’s shelling was in response to attempts by terrorists to attack military posts in Hama’s north-western countryside.

Citing an unidentified military source, Sana said several Syrian troops were killed and others were wounded in clashes with militants who were trying to reach government territory on the edges of the demilitarised zone.

However, Mr Abu Huzaifah, the NLF spokesman, said it was regime forces that were trying to infiltrate rebel-held areas. This led to skirmishes in which some of their fighters were killed and provoked retaliatory shelling from government forces, he said.

The tit-for-tat attacks forced hundreds of families who had been encouraged to return to some front-line villages in the zone to flee farther north near the Turkish border.

More than half a million people have been killed in Syria since war broke out in 2011. The conflict has displaced nearly half the population, with 5.6 million fleeing to adjacent countries and Europe.