Dozens dead after rebels and extremists clash in Syria

Clashes between extremists and rebels raged Thursday inside Syria’s last major opposition bastion for a third day, an activist group said, as the death toll mounted to more than 70 fighters. Fighting flared Tuesday between Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham and a rival rebel alliance in the northern province of Aleppo, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

The fighting then spread to parts of the neighboring province of Idlib the next day, and into Hama province Thursday, the Britain-based activist group said.

“New fronts have opened up,” Observatory chief Rami Abdel Rahman said, with HTS seizing more than a dozen areas in recent days.

Wednesday, 17 HTS fighters and 16 combatants from the Turkish-backed National Liberation Front rebel alliance were killed.

That brought the overall death toll to 75 fighters from both sides, as well as six civilians, according to the Observatory.

Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham had Monday accused NLF member Nureddine al-Zinki of killing five of its fighters, and launched an offensive against rebel positions.

HTS, which is led by Syria’s former Al-Qaeda affiliate, and rival rebels from the NLF, have been battling each other for territory for the past two years. And the last major rebel bastion of Idlib – which includes adjacent parts of Aleppo and Hama – has been regularly rocked by assassinations.

Since September, the stronghold has been protected from a regime offensive by a shaky deal signed by rebel backer Turkey and government ally Russia to set up a buffer zone around it.

Sparked by the brutal repression of anti-regime protests in 2011, the civil war has since killed more than 360,000 people and displaced more than half the country’s population.

British Foreign Minister Jeremy Hunt meanwhile said Syrian President Bashar Assad will remain in place for “a while” thanks to support from Russia, even though Britain’s position was still that he remains a block to lasting peace.

“The British long-standing position is that we won’t have lasting peace in Syria with that [Assad-led] regime, but regretfully, we do think he’s going to be around for a while,” Hunt told Sky News.

Last week, the United Arab Emirates reopened its embassy in Damascus, marking a diplomatic boost for Assad from a U.S.-allied Arab state that once backed rebels fighting him.

Source: Dozens dead after rebels and extremists clash in Syria | News , Middle East | THE DAILY STAR