Insurgents battle army near Assad heartland

Residents walk amidst debris at a site which activists said was targeted in a barrel bomb attack by regime forces in Aleppo yesterday.Reuters/Amman/BeirutIslamist rebels and the Syrian army fought fierce battles in Latakia province overnight close to President Bashar al-Assad’s ancestral home, the army and rebels said, after weeks of insurgent gains in the country’s northwest. Rebels seeking to topple Assad have in the past sought to bring their four-year-long insurgency close to coastal areas in government-held Latakia, heartland of Assad’s minority Alawite community. An army source told state news agency Sana fighter jets hit insurgent hideouts in the northern Latakia countryside with “tens killed and wounded”. Latakia is the main port in Syria and along with the capital Damascus is one of the most important government-held areas in the country. The violence follows advances in neighbouring Idlib province by the hardline Ahrar al-Sham group and Syria’s Al Qaeda wing Al Nusra Front as well as other allied fighters. Rami Abdel Rahman, who runs the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group, said the Latakia battles started with an army offensive on Thursday, backed by local militias, aimed at pushing the insurgents out of the province in order to advance on captured areas of neighbouring Idlib. The Observatory, which collects information from a network of sources on the ground, said at least five insurgents were killed and an unidentified number from the pro-government side. Two rebel sources said the fighting in Latakia was near the mountains of Jabal al-Akrad, close to some of the highest peaks in Syria including Nabi Younis that overlook Alawite villages and close to Qardaha, hometown of the Assad family. “The capture of the peaks would make the Alawite villages in our firing range,” said an Ahrar al-Sham commander based in Idlib on Skype. In August 2013, Islamist rebels and foreign fighters briefly captured Alawite villages. The Observatory’s Abdel Rahman said the army wanted to secure the valley and peaks in order to advance on Jisr al-Shughur, a town in Idlib province captured by insurgents a week ago. Battles raged around a hospital on the southwestern outskirts of the town yesterday where army forces and allied fighters have been holed up since the insurgent offensive began, the Observatory said, adding that a blast had targeted the army earlier in the day. Yesterday Syrian television said army units targeted “groups of terrorists” in the eastern and southern Idlib countryside and “eliminated a great number of them and destroyed their weapons and munitions”. Diplomats say rebels are trying to pressure the overstretched army on as many fronts as possible to spread its resources ever more thinly.    l Lebanon’s army said yesterday it had received the bodies of two people killed by militants and that their identities were being checked, but it gave no details on which group had delivered them. Earlier yesterday, LBC television and other local media had reported that Islamic State (IS) had handed over the bodies of a civilian and a soldier who were killed last year on the outskirts of Arsal, a town near the Syrian border. The army said the handover had taken place at a military outpost in the eastern border area. If it was IS, that would be the first time that the hardline group had co-operated with the army to hand over bodies. The army said the central military hospital was carrying out DNA tests on the bodies. The Lebanese government has been seeking the release of about two dozen soldiers held captive by Islamist militants since last year, in a crisis that has triggered frequent demonstrations by the families of the soldiers. Fighting in Arsal last year between Islamist gunmen and the army marked some of the worst spillover violence since Syria’s war began four years ago, and has risked exacerbating tensions in Lebanon among sectarian groups at odds over the Syrian conflict. Both IS and Al Nusra Front took soldiers captive after entering Arsal and have beheaded or shot dead some of them. There have also been several attacks by militant gunmen believed to be from Al Nusra or IS on Lebanese soldiers in border areas and campaigns by the army against militant positions.