BEIRUT: Jihadi fighters cut the Damascus-to-Aleppo highway on Thursday in an offensive that a monitor said killed nearly 200 people, including civilians, in Russian air strikes.
A day earlier, the jihadist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) and allied factions launched a surprise attack on government-held areas of northern Aleppo province, triggering the heaviest fighting in years, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said. .
The Observatory said the death toll in the ongoing fighting “has risen to 182, including 102 fighters from HTS”, 19 allied factions “and 61 government forces and allied groups”.
Rami Abdel Rahman, head of the Observatory, said 19 civilians were killed in Russian airstrikes on rural areas of Aleppo on Thursday, adding that another civilian was also killed by Syrian army shelling a day earlier.
Russia is a close ally of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and first intervened in Syria’s civil war in 2015, turning the tide of the conflict in favor of the president, whose forces once controlled only a fifth of the country. Was controlling.
The UK-based monitor said HTS and its allied factions, including groups backed by neighboring Turkey, “cut off the Damascus-Aleppo international M5 highway… to control the junction between the M4 and M5 highways.” Plus,” said the UK-based monitor.
“The highway is now out of service, after it was reopened years ago by government forces,” said the monitor, which has a network of sources inside Syria.
The junction of the M5 and M4 highways connects the capital and coastal government stronghold of Latakia, respectively, with the second city of Aleppo.
Some of the clashes, which are taking place in an area spanning Idlib and Aleppo provinces, are less than 10 kilometers (six miles) southwest of the outskirts of Aleppo city.
“Ankara is sending a message to both Damascus and Moscow to back off its military efforts in northwestern Syria,” he said, after some Turkish-backed factions joined the offensive.
Along with Russia, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is backed in the civil war by Iran and its allied militant groups, including Lebanon’s powerful Hezbollah.
A general of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards was killed Thursday during fighting between Syrian government forces and jihadists in Syria, according to an Iranian news agency.
The Syrian jihadists and their allies started their attack on the same day that the Lebanon-Israel ceasefire was implemented.
HTS, led by al-Qaeda’s former Syrian branch, controls the northwestern Idlib region as well as small parts of neighboring Aleppo, Hama and Latakia provinces.
The army faced an attack “in support of friendly forces” “which is still ongoing”, causing “heavy losses” to the armed groups, the military statement said, without reporting army casualties.
Syria’s conflict, which began in 2011 after Assad’s crackdown on anti-government protests, has spiraled into a complex conflict that has drawn in foreign troops and jihadists.