Syrian rebels, including jihadists, seized the last government-held town on the main highway between second city Aleppo and the city of Hama to the south, a monitoring group said.
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In the interim, groups like the London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, confirmed reports of fierce fighting in the area, part of a larger rebel counter offensive against the Syrian regime.
“It does appear that they were in areas where there probably were not ISIL forces, and that is precisely one of the problems with this whole approach”, Carter said at the time, referring to the terror group by the name the USA government uses to describe it.
Russian Federation says its air force has flown 1,631 sorties and struck 2,084 militant targets since the start of the campaign.
Russia’s air force intervened in Syria’s four-year civil war on September. US officials have voiced a similar view, while rebels have said the Russian-backed attacks are failing and they expect more gains for their side. “We fire 15 TOWs and we get 15 TOWs in return”, he said.
“Rebels took complete control of Morek and the tank battalion adjacent to it”, Sharif Muhammad, the spokesman for the pro-opposition Hama Media Center told Syria Direct Thursday.
More than 250,000 people have been killed in the war, which began in 2011 and has frequently spilled across the border. Earlier this year, it has had limited success in retaking territory gained by rebels. The town, in Idlib, is near the border with Hama province, and Assad’s troops and Hezbollah fighters have been battling to try to seize it as part of a campaign aimed at increasing protection to a string of Alawite-majority, pro-government towns in Hama. Al-Bayoush said he sent home 130 fighters who had been undergoing training because if a missile hit their training camp, “there would be a massacre”.
Also, Iran denies that it has deployed soldiers to fight in Syria, and says it only provides the Syrian army with military advisers. A USA intelligence official noted that while the Russian-backed offensive is “progressing slowly”, Assad’s allies have been steadily applying more pressure since the start of last month.
The FSA groups totally dismissed recent reports that their representatives are going to meet with the defense and foreign ministers of Russian Federation next week in UAE’s city of Abu Dhabi.
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When asked by Reuters if saving Assad was a matter of principle for Moscow, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said, “Absolutely not, we never said that”.
