The IS offensive targeting Syrian opposition strongholds near the Turkish border began on Thursday night.
Advertisement
“More than 6,000 civilians, a lot of them women and children, were able to flee areas in the countryside of Aleppo province. especially from Marea town and Sheikh Issa village” to its west, the Britain-based monitoring group said.
That’s because Marea itself is just another stopping point along the road to Azaz, which is already awash in refugees from the offensive over the past few weeks.
Meanwhile, Syrian Army warplanes and helicopters hit other opposition-held towns in Aleppo province, putting a further strain on rebels fighting President Bashar al-Assad’s forces.
Ahmed Khatib, an official at IHH Humanitarian Relief Foundation, said on Saturday that al-Hilal camp is full, while half of the refugees at the Sijju camp have left it.
The fighting in the past two days has killed at least 27 civilians as well as 41 combatants, the Observatory said. “Fleeing civilians are being caught in the cross-fire and are facing challenges to access medical services, food, water, and safety”, the statement said.
An advance by the extremists on Friday that cut Marea off from another key insurgent-held town, Azaz, was their biggest territorial gain in the northern province of Aleppo for two years, the Observatory said.
World powers, including the United States and Russian Federation which support opposing sides in Syria’s civil war, are at a loss as to how to jumpstart peace talks which collapsed in Geneva earlier this year.
Rebels retook the villages of Kafr Shoush and Braghida on Sunday, expanding their buffer around the rebel-held town of Azaz, home to tens of thousands of people displaced by war, according to the Local Coordination Committees, an activist network inside the country. It said that the rebels surrendered control of a village near Marea to an SDF division in exchange for allowing 6,000 civilians to evacuate to areas under Kurdish control.
IS has been battling rebel factions fighting under the banner of the Free Syrian Army since late past year, but clashes have intensified in recent weeks. Rebel groups battling Islamic State in the area, which Washington sees as strategically vital, have been supplied with weapons via Turkey.
Advertisement
“With all these actors positioned to make land grabs in the area, and rebels exhausted by months of fighting, the corridor is now on the verge of collapse”, wrote Faysal Itani, a resident senior fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East, in an analysis for the center.
