Qaeda splinter group moves to take eastern Syrian city
Presidential campaign opens as war rages on
Conflict
BEIRUT, May 11, (Agencies): An al-Qaeda splinter group has wrested control of key parts of the eastern Syrian province of Deir al-Zor from other rebel groups, activists said on Sunday, worsening infighting that has handicapped the insurgency against President Bashar alAssad.
More than 100,000 civilians have fled the province following weeks of intense clashes between Islamist insurgents, the anti- Assad Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group said.
Civilians in Deir al-Zor lived through more than two years of fighting between opposition fighters and the government. Now they are dealing with a second wave of internecine war that has devastated parts of the country that the opposition considers “liberated” from Assad’s forces.
The Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) - which started as an offshoot of alQaeda in Iraq but has since been disowned - took neighbourhoods of Deir al-Zor city from the Nusra Front, Syria’s official alQaeda affiliate, this weekend, according to the Observatory.
Some 230 militants have been killed over the past 10 days by the infighting, it added. Although ISIL made headway in the fight for Deir al-Zor, opposition groups rarely hold territory for long before clashes resume.
More than 150,000 people have been killed in the three-year-old rebellion, which started as a peaceful protest movement and turned into a civil war after a government crackdown.
World powers have been deadlocked over how to resolve the conflict, further complicated by deadly feuding between rebel groups that has killed thousands of fighters this year.
The fighting centres around villages on the outskirts of Deir al-Zor where rebel groups have been fighting each other for control of oilfields and strategic areas.
In Syria’s conflict, clashes tend to be highly localised and, when it suits their aims, the Nusra Front and ISIL have fought side by side in some areas.
ISIL is a rebranding of al-Qaeda in Iraq, which fought against American forces during the US occupation. It draws strength from a core of foreign fighters and has imposed a strict interpretation of Islamic law in territories it controls.
The Nusra Front imposes similar laws but the two groups have come to blows over power and land disputes.
Meanwhile, on billboards and in posters taped to car windows, new portraits of President Bashar Assad filled the streets of Damascus on Sunday as Syria officially opened its presidential campaign despite a crippling civil war that has devastated the country and left large chunks of territory outside of government control.
The Syrian opposition and its Western allies have denounced the June 3 election as a sham designed to lend Assad, who is widely expected to win another seven-year term, a veneer of electoral legitimacy. The government, meanwhile, has touted the vote as the political solution to the conflict. Russian-speaking east, an industrial hub, into the Russian Federation following its annexation of the Black Sea peninsula of Crimea after a referendum in March.
Ukraine’s Interior Ministry called the referendum a criminal farce, its ballot papers “soaked in blood”. One official said that two thirds of the territory had declined to participate.
Ballot papers in the referendum in the regions of Luhansk and Donetsk, which has declared itself a “People’s Republic”, were printed without security provision, voter registration was patchy and there was confusion over what the vote was for. Separatists in Luhansk said only five percent had voted against.
Engineer Sergei, 33, voting in the industrial centre of Mariupol, said he would answer “Yes” to the question printed in Russian and Ukrainian on the ballot: “Do you support the act of state self-rule of the Donetsk People’s Republic?”
“We’re all for the independence of the Donetsk republic,” he said. “It means leaving behind that fascist, pro-American government (in Kiev), which brought no one any good.”
But in the same queue of voters, 54year-old Irina, saw a “Yes” vote as endorsement of autonomy within Ukraine.