Assad in rare public outing at mosque retaken from Isil

BASHAR ASSAD, the Syrian president, made a rare public appearance yesterday at a mosque in a town recently captured from Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, where he was greeted by worshippers who chanted in his support.

He prayed in Bilal mosque in the mountainous Qalamoun area, which was this week declared free of the extremists, for the occasion of the Islamic festival of Eid al-adha.

Mr Assad was shown on state television standing and kneeling on a green carpet in a packed mosque alongside Syrian religious leaders as he followed the imam giving prayers.

Confined to Damascus for long periods in the early part of Syria’s six-year civil war, Mr Assad has grown more confident in travelling around government-held areas as the army and its allies have won a series of victories.

Qalamoun, 70 miles north of Damascus, is thought to be the furthest he has travelled from the seat of power in some time. The town fell during a joint week-long offensive between Syria’s army and Lebanon’s Hizbollah militia to oust the militants from an area that straddles the Syria-lebanon border.

But the offensive was overshadowed by a controversial deal to transport the remaining militants from the area to an Isil-held town in eastern Syria near the Iraqi border in exchange for revealing the fate of missing Lebanese fighters.

The Hizbollah-negotiated deal angered Iraq and the US, which bombed the route ahead of a convoy carrying around 300 militants and as many family members as it headed to the province of Deir Ezzor.

On Thursday, the convoy tried again through a different route. The Britishbased Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said some ambulances carrying wounded fighters were part of the Isil convoy that crossed into Deir Ezzor.