ISIL seizes several villages
Launch surprise attacks to get within a few kilometres of Aleppo
BEIRUT Islamic State militants captured a string of villages near Aleppo on Friday in a lightning attack that brought them closer to the prized city in northern Syria, despite a major increase in Russian airstrikes that Moscow insists are targeting the extremists.
The surprise advance that brought the ISIL group to within a few miles of Aleppo was the most significant in months, following what has largely been a summer of stalemate in the war against the extremists.
It comes amid a wave of intense Russian airstrikes that have targeted insurgents fighting to topple President Bashar Assad, and a ground offensive by the Syrian army in the country’s central region.
Moscow says it is targeting mainly Islamic State militants, but U.S. officials and Syrian rebels have said the strikes have hit mainstream rebels for the most part and are aimed at shoring up Assad’s embattled government and troops. Many of the rebel groups hit by the Russian strikes are also at war with the ISIL group, they say.
“Everyone who wants to fight the rebels says that they are coming to fight Daesh while in fact they want to fight the rebels,” said Bahaa alHalaby, an activist based in the city of Aleppo, using an Arabic acronym for ISIL.
Russian General Staff deputy chief Lt. Gen. Igor Makushev said Russian warplanes conducted 67 sorties over the past day — a significant increase over previous days.
He said the strikes killed 100 militants and destroyed an ammunition dump near Aleppo.
“Militants are sustaining substantial losses under the Russian airstrikes and are having to change their tactics, to scatter their forces, to carefully disguise themselves and hide in settlement,” he said.
The Observatory said the extremists’ surprise advance north of Aleppo, which began Thursday night, is the most significant in months. It said the militants seized the villages of Tal Qrah, Tal Sousin and Kfar Qares north of Aleppo, Syria’s largest city and its one-time commercial capital.
The group also seized a former army base known as the Infantry Academy that rebels captured from the Syrian army two years ago.
The advance highlighted the rapidly shifting terrain in Syria, where Russia and the United States are launching airstrikes and lending support to opposite sides in the country’s nearly fiveyear civil war.
Some opposition activists said the Islamic State group took advantage of Russian airstrikes and the rebels’ preoccupation with fighting Syrian troops on other fronts in central Syria.
“At a time when the rebels are waging fierce battles against the Russian occupiers in Hama countryside, Daesh seizes the Infantry Academy and a number of villages in Aleppo,” said Hadi Abdullah, an activist with close links to the Army of Conquest, a coalition that includes mainstream rebels as well as al-Qaida’s affiliate, the Nusra Front.
The Army of Conquest, which had made a string of advances against government troops in recent months, has come under attack from Russian warplanes.
In Tehran, state media reported that a senior commander in Iran’s powerful Revolutionary Guard was killed by the Islamic State group on the outskirts of Aleppo city, but it was not immediately clear whether Gen. Hossein Hamedani’s death was related to the new ISIL offensive.
Hamedani is one of the most senior Guard commanders to be killed in Syria, and the second to be killed this year. He was a veteran commander who had an important role in Iran’s 1980-88 war with Iraq and was among top Iranian commanders co-ordinating fighting in Syria. Hamedani was also reportedly in charge of organizing and commanding the various Iranian-backed Shiite militias fighting alongside Assad’s forces.