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Syria regime forces battle jihadists for key town, highway
BEIRUT, Aug 18, 2019 (BSS/AFP) – Syrian pro-regime forces fought pitched
battles Sunday with insurgents as they inched closer to a jihadist-run town
in the northwestern province of Idlib, a war monitor said.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said “fierce
clashes” between loyalist forces, jihadists and allied rebels were taking
place one kilometre (0.6 miles) west of Khan Sheikhun.
The latest fighting broke out overnight Saturday to Sunday and has already
killed 26 jihadists and allied rebels and 11 members of the pro-regime
forces, the war monitor said.
The town of Khan Sheikhun lies on a key highway coveted by the regime.
The road runs through Idlib, connecting government-held Damascus with the
northern city of Aleppo, which was retaken by loyalists from rebels in
December 2016.
Pro-regime forces are deployed around three kilometres (1.8 miles) from
the road and have been advancing over the past few days in a bid to encircle
Khan Sheikhun from the north and the west and seize the highway.
On Sunday they retook the village of Tel al-Nar and nearby farmland
northwest of Khan Sheikhun “and were moving close to the highway,”
Observatory head Rami Abdel Rahman said.
But their advance from the east was being slowed down due to “a ferocious
resistance” from jihadists and allied rebels.
Syria’s former Al-Qaeda affiliate Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) controls most
of Idlib province as well as parts of the neighbouring provinces of Hama,
Aleppo and Latakia.
A buffer zone deal brokered by Russia and Turkey last year was supposed to
protect the Idlib region’s three million inhabitants from an all-out regime
offensive, but it was never fully implemented.
Regime and Russian air strikes and shelling since late April have killed
more than 860 civilians, according to the Observatory, which relies on
sources inside Syria for its information.
On Sunday air strikes by the Syrian regime and its ally Russia killed two
people, including a child, in the south of Idlib, the Observatory said.
More than 1,370 insurgents and over 1,200 pro-regime forces have been
killed since April, according to the monitor.
The violence has displaced more than 400,000 people, the United Nations
says.
“Many of these people have been displaced up to five times,” the UN’s
regional spokesman for the Syria crisis, David Swanson, told AFP on Saturday.
Syria’s conflict has killed more than 370,000 people and displaced
millions at home and abroad since starting with the brutal repression of
anti-regime protests in 2011.
BSS/AFP/BZC/1840HRS