Assad’s forces close in on base used by UK and US soldiers

SYRIAN troops loyal to President Bashar al-assad appeared to be on a collision course with US and British special forces yesterday, after advancing to within 15 miles of their training base in the east of the country.

The assault came as the US accused the Assad regime of killing detainees at its most notorious prison on an industrial scale and burning “the evidence”.

Pro-government soldiers were last night close to al-tanf, a heavily fortified base for American and British special forces training Syrian rebel groups fighting Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil) near the Iraq border.

Assad’s forces, backed by Iranian and Lebanese Hizbollah fighters, have in recent days moved dozens of tanks and surface-to-air missiles closer to the eastern front line with the moderate Free Syrian Army units in an apparent warning to the Us-led coalition, which flies sorties against Isil in the area.

The assault is being led by Iranian forces, with the help of Russian jets in the skies.

Tensions on the ground were matched by conflict off the battlefield yesterday, after the US said it had intelligence that the Syrian regime has burnt the bodies of thousands of prisoners outside a notorious jail in an effort to conceal the extent of its killing

Stuart Jones, the acting assistant secretary for the US State Department Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, accused Assad’s government of “sinking to a new level of depravity” with the support of Russia, which “has either aided in or passively looked away”.

The corpses were incinerated in a newly built crematorium next to Sednaya prison outside the capital Damascus in order to “manage” the numbers and destroy the evidence, Mr Jones told reporters.

Mr Jones estimated that as many as 117,000 people have been detained in Syrian prisons since the beginning of the uprising against the president in 2011. The information, said Mr Jones, came from credible human rights groups, non-governmental sources, and “intelligence assessments”.

It came as Barack Obama defended his decision not to bomb Syria following the use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime in 2013, saying in an interview that it was “the issue that required the most political courage” in his presidency.

Efforts to end the war are now proceeding along two rival tracks: the formal political process hosted at UN headquarters in Switzerland and, since January, parallel talks in the Kazakhstan capital Astana brokered by Russia, Iran and Turkey.