Syria rebels, allies cut key highway as escalating fighting kills around 200

BEIRUT — Rebel fighters cut the Damascus to Aleppo highway on Thursday during an offensive that a monitor says killed around 200 people, including civilians hit by Russian air force strikes.

A day earlier, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and allied factions launched a surprise attack on government-held areas of northern Aleppo province, triggering the fiercest fighting in years, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said. HTS is listed as a terrorist organization by the U.S. and Turkey.

The toll in ongoing battles “has risen to 182, including 102 fighters from HTS,” 19 from allied factions “and 61 regime forces and allied groups,” the Observatory said.

“Russian airstrikes on the Aleppo countryside killed 19 civilians on Thursday,” said Rami Abdel Rahman, who heads the Observatory, adding that another civilian had been killed in 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 momentum of the conflict in favor of the president, whose forces once controlled only a fifth of the country.

HTS and its allied factions, including groups backed by Turkey, “cut off the Damascus-Aleppo international M5 highway … in addition to controlling the junction between the M4 and M5 highways,” the Britain-based monitor said. It has a network of sources inside Syria.

The U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said “more than 14,000 people – nearly half are children – have been displaced” by the violence.

Syria has been gripped by civil war for more than a decade, although the intensity of the conflict had decreased in recent years.

“This operation aims to repel the sources of fire of the criminal enemy from the front lines,” Mohamed Bashir, who heads HTS’s so-called salvation government, said during a press conference.

Analyst Nick Heras of the New Lines Institute for Strategy and Policy said the rebels were “trying to preempt the possibility of a Syrian military campaign in the region of Aleppo,” which Russian and Syrian government airstrikes against rebel areas have been preparing for.

With some Turkey-backed factions joining the offensive, “Ankara is sending a message to both Damascus and Moscow to back down from their military efforts in northwest Syria,” he said.

In addition to Russia, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has been backed in the civil war by Iran and allied militant groups, including Lebanon’s powerful Hezbollah.

During more than two months of war with Hezbollah in Lebanon, Israel intensified its strikes on Iran-backed groups in Syria, including Hezbollah.

Rebel forces “are in a better position to take and seize villages than Russian-backed Syrian government forces, while the Iranians are focused on Lebanon,” Heras said.

The Syrian rebels and their allies launched their attack the day the Lebanon-Israel truce came into effect.

HTS, led by al-Qaida’s former Syria branch, controls swaths of the northwest Idlib area as well as small parts of neighboring Aleppo, Hama and Latakia provinces.

An AFP correspondent reported heavy, uninterrupted clashes east of the city of Idlib since Wednesday morning, including airstrikes.

A military statement carried by state news agency SANA said that “armed terrorist organizations grouped under so-called ‘Nusra terrorist front’ present in Aleppo and Idlib provinces launched a large, broad-fronted attack” Wednesday morning.

It said the attack with “medium and heavy weapons targeted safe villages and towns and our military sites in those areas.”

The army “in cooperation with friendly forces” confronted the attack “which is still continuing,” inflicting “heavy losses” on the armed groups, the military statement said, without reporting army losses.

Syria’s conflict broke out after Assad crushed anti-government protests in 2011. It spiraled into a complex conflict that has drawn in foreign armies and rebels.

It has killed more than 500,000 people, displaced millions and battered the country’s infrastructure and industry.

The Idlib region is subject to a ceasefire — repeatedly violated but which had largely been holding — brokered by Turkey and Russia after a Syrian government offensive in March 2020.