Gains made by Damascus have relied heavily on Russian air support since September past year.
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The rebels now appear to have secured a roughly 90km stretch of land that Turkey has long wanted to control, to keep out jihadists and to stop the advance of US-backed Syrian Kurdish fighters. The Observatory said the blast killed 14 people, including 11 rebels.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which maintains a network of contacts inside Syria, put the overall death toll at 53. According to reports, government forces had captured two military academy sites and cut off a supply line that the rebels had recently established.
In a statement released Saturday, the governor’s office of Van said eight soldiers were killed and eight wounded in Friday operations around Tendurek Mountain.
The loss of the Turkish border will also deprive IS of a key transit point for recruits and supplies, though the group continues to hold territory in both Syria and Iraq.
The Turkish military responded to the rockets Saturday with howitzers, striking two weapons depots and bunkers and “destroying the locations and the Daesh terrorists there”, the state-run Anadolu news agency said, referring to the Islamic State by an Arabic acronym.
On Aug. 24 morning, the Turkish Air Force, with the support of the coalition aircraft, launched an operation to liberate the city of Jarabulus from the IS militants in northern Syria, near Aleppo.
However, besides ISIS, the FSA and Turkey are clashing with the Kurdish YPG militia, which is part of the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).
Turkey’s direct military involvement in the push against IS began late last month, when Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan – responding to a civilian massacre in Turkey’s southeast – sent warplanes, tanks and artillery to crush terror threats on the border.
Sunday’s advances illustrate the complexity of the Syrian conflict, which has drawn in most world and regional powers.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, left, listens to U.S. President Barack Obama in Hangzhou in eastern China’s Zhejiang province, Monday, Sept. 5, 2016.
Reporters had gathered in a small conference room with two lecterns set up side by side, awaiting a potential deal. They fired at the vehicle, forcing two passengers to get out and the driver to blow it up, Bittar said. He did not elaborate. He called it a “huge contradiction” that “some of our friends” have chosen to back one terrorist group to fight another in Syria.
The agreement was to have focused on the city of Aleppo and ways to deliver humanitarian aid to needy civilians.
Underscoring the need to stem the violence, a string of bomb attacks hit mostly government-controlled areas of Syria yesterday, killing at least 48 people, with 35 of them from a double bombing outside of the government stronghold of Tartus.
A letter from Washington’s Syria envoy Michael Ratney to the Syrian armed opposition, a copy of which was seen by Reuters, laid out some of the ceasefire terms. Government forces withdrew in August after street battles with Kurdish forces, which took control of the city, though the state’s police force remained in place.
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Top diplomats from the United States and Russian Federation yesterday failed to reach a deal to provide aid to ravaged civilians in Aleppo, and at least partially halt bombardments from Syria and Russian Federation, which began an aerial campaign in support of the Syrian government last September.
