Cairo to Ankara: Uphold Syrian territorial unity

Assad jets bombard plain after rebel attack, monitor says

CAIRO/BEIRUT (Reuters) – Egypt said Syria’s territorial integrity must be preserved, in an apparent sign of its disapproval toward Turkish intervention against militants in Iraq and Syria.

The Foreign Ministry said in a statement on Tuesday that Cairo supports combating what it called terrorist groups in Syria.

But this effort must happen “within the context of preserving the unity and integrity of Syria’s territories... in accordance with international legal norms and decisions,” it said.

Turkey last week began bombarding targets in Syria linked to the Islamic State and granted access to its air bases to a US led-coalition. The move ended a policy which avoided direct intervention in the Syria conflict.

In recent days Syria also struck militants from the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) in Iraq in response to attacks against its security forces.

Washington and Ankara announced plans to sweep Islamic State fighters from a strip of land along the border, a move which could possibly provide a safe haven for civilians.

The Egyptian statement did not elaborate nor mention Turkey.

Political analyst Hassan Abou Taleb of Al Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies said that Egypt’s message was a “condemnation and rejection of Turkey’s unilateral moves.”

Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, who is fighting Islamist terrorists in Sinai, has stressed the need to maintain Syria’s unity in the past.

Various countries, including the United States, support rebels fighting to bring down President Bashar Assad. The conflict has seen a proliferation of jihadist groups opposed to both Assad and the West, however, as well as to the fragmentation of the country.

Four years into a war that has killed more than 220,000 people, Assad can no longer defend the whole country or hope to regain lost territory. His forces are retreating and fortifying their core strongholds, from the capital Damascus up to the coastal strip in northwestern Syria.

The main blocs of insurgents – Islamic State in the East, a rival Islamist alliance in the northwest, nationalist rebels in the south and Kurds in the north – are carving out their own fiefdoms.

Sisi is also worried about Islamists in neighboring Libya, which has descended into chaos since autocrat Muammar Gaddafi was toppled and executed in 2011.

Egypt intervened in Libya in February when it bombed Islamic States targets there after the terrorist group beheaded 21 Egyptian Christians.

The Syrian air force bombarded a plain in the northwest of the country overnight, a group monitoring the war said, after insurgents launched an offensive to advance deeper into government-held areas vital to President Bashar Assad.

The insurgents are seeking to drive into the Sahl al-Ghab plain, an area crucial to the defense of the western coastal mountains that are part of the heartland of Assad’s Alawite sect as well as lying close to Hama city to the southeast.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which tracks the conflict using contacts on the ground, said Syrian warplanes had carried out more than 160 air strikes on the plain and in the nearby Idlib countryside to try to disrupt the insurgents’ progress towards key Assad territory.

The insurgents, who have entered at the northern tip of the plain, can use their antitank missiles to target Syrian army tank positions, giving them some advantages over flat ground, a diplomat tracking Syria said.

Most of Idlib province was captured earlier this year in a major advance by the insurgent grouping “Army of Conquest” against government forces.