Fierce fighting has resumed between President Bashar al-Assad’s forces and opposition fighters after rebels attacked regime troops stationed around an airbase in northwestern Syria, a watchdog says.
Wednesday’s Clashes between rebel fighters and al-Assad’s forces at airbase in Idlib province killed four armed men and an unknown number of soldiers, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said. The monitoring group said Syrian rebels fired machineguns and mortars at helicopters grounded at the Afis military airport near the main Aleppo-Damascus highway on Wednesday. The rebel assault came after authorities announced the temporary closure of the international airport in Aleppo province on Tuesday, after days of attacks there by the rebels who hold vast swathes of territory in northern Syria.
A local resident told AFP news agency that the army was carrying out air raids around the Taftanaz base in an attempt to repel the multi-pronged attack. Fighting also broke out around the crucial Wadi Deif base, one of the last regime bastions in northwestern Syria, the Britain-based Observatory said, in a fresh bid to wrest control of the strategic post.
Rebels captured the nearby town of Maaret al-Numan, located on the important Damascus-Aleppo highway, in October.
Regime warplanes also bombed the town of Moadamiyet al-Sham, southwest of the capital, killing at least 12 members of the same family, most of them children, the watchdog said. Warplanes also attacked the towns of Shebaa to the southeast and Deir Assafir south of Damascus, where 11 children were killed in November when cluster bombs were dropped on a playground, according to Human Rights Watch. The deadly strikes came as forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad battled rebels with artillery fire in Harasta and Douma, rebel strongholds to the northeast of the capital, and in Daraya to the southwest. Army reinforcements have been massing for weeks in Daraya in a bid to drive rebel Free Syrian Army fighters from the town, the site of the bloodiest massacre of the conflict in which hundreds died in August.
