In this Sunday Feb. 15,
2015 photo shows Syrian rebels firing locally made shells against the
Syrian government forces, in Aleppo, Syria. (AP Photo/Aleppo Media
Center, AMC)
BEIRUT—Islamic State militants entered a major Syrian
opposition stronghold in the country’s north on Saturday, clashing with
rebels on the edges of the town as the extremist group builds on its
most significant advance near the Turkish border in two years — even as
it loses ground elsewhere in the country and in neighboring Iraq.
The town of Marea, just north of Aleppo city, has long been
considered a bastion of relatively moderate Syrian revolutionary forces
fighting to topple Assad. The IS assault underlined the weakness of the
groups fighting under the loose banner of the so-called Free Syrian Army
that have been struggling to survive.
More than 160,000 civilians have been trapped by the fighting, which
also forced the evacuation of one of the few remaining hospitals in the
area, run by the international medical organization Doctors Without
Borders.
On Saturday, IS fighters staged two suicide bombings targeting
“opposition forces” near Marea, IS said via its news agency, Aamaq.
Following the suicide bombings, IS militants entered Marea and
fighting began inside the town, according to the Syrian Observatory for
Human Rights, a Britain-based opposition media outfit that tracks
Syria’s civil war.
Dr. Abdel Rahman Alhafez, who heads one of the last remaining
hospitals in Marea, said the town was encircled and his hospital under
threat since Friday. “We need urgent protection for the hospital or a
way out,” he said in an emailed statement.
Syrian army warplanes and helicopters, meanwhile, pounded other
opposition-held towns in Aleppo province on Saturday, putting a further
strain on embattled rebels fighting President Bashar Assad’s forces.
In
this Thursday, Feb. 11, 2016 file photo, a child navigates rubble and
barbed wire in Aleppo, Syria. (Alexander Kots/Komsomolskaya Pravda via
AP)
Islamic State’s territorial gains around Marea and Azaz, both
critical rebel bastions north of the city of Aleppo, are a blow to the
Turkey- and Saudi-backed opposition fighters who have been struggling to
retain a foothold in the region while being squeezed by opponents from
all sides. They also demonstrated the IS group’s ability to stage major
offensives and capture new areas, despite a string of recent losses in
Syria and Iraq.
American Special Operations forces and a coalition of Syrian and Arab
fighters known as the Syria Democratic Forces have begun clearing areas
north of Raqqa, the Islamic State’s de facto capital in Syria, in
preparation for an eventual assault on the city.
The IS offensive targeting Syrian opposition strongholds near the Turkish border began on Thursday night.
On Friday, militants of the group captured six villages near Azaz,
triggering intense fighting that trapped tens of thousands of civilians
unable to flee to safety while Turkey’s border remains closed. A few
hundred fled west to the Kurdish-held enclave of Afrin.
People are “terrified for their lives,” the International Rescue
Committee said in a statement. The group said it has received confirmed
reports that at least four entire families, including women and
children, were killed Friday on the outskirts of Azaz.
The IRC runs centers for both children and women in Azaz and provides
clean water and sanitation to a camp supporting 8,500 people. More than
half the camp’s population has left to find safety elsewhere in the
town, it said. The IRC also relocated its staff from the centers and the
camp to safer areas of Azaz until the situation enables them to return.
In
This April 21, 2014, photo shows a Syrian man holding a girl as he
stands on the rubble of houses that were destroyed by Syrian government
forces air strikes in Aleppo, Syria. (AP Photo/Aleppo Media Center AMC)
The U.N. refugee agency said it was “deeply concerned” about the fighting affecting thousands of vulnerable civilians.
“Fleeing civilians are being caught in crossfire and are facing
challenges to access medical services, food, water and safety,” it said
in a statement Saturday.
The advances brought the militants to within a few kilometers (miles)
of the rebel-held Azaz and cut off supplies to Marea further south.
World powers, including the United States and Russia which support
opposing sides in Syria’s civil war, are at a loss as to how to
jumpstart peace talks which collapsed in Geneva earlier this year. The
war, now in its sixth year, has killed more than a quarter of a million
people and displaced half the country’s population.
Azaz, which hosts tens of thousands of internally displaced people,
lies north of Aleppo city, which has been divided between a rebel-held
east and government-held west.
A route known as the Azaz corridor links rebel-held eastern Aleppo
with Turkey. That has been a lifeline for the rebels since 2012, but a
government offensive backed by Russian air power and regional militias
earlier this year dislodged rebels from parts of Azaz, narrowing the
corridor between the Turkish border and Aleppo.
In
this Thursday, Feb. 11, 2016 photo, children walk down a street in
Aleppo, Syria. (Alexander Kots/Komsomolskaya Pravda via AP)
The predominantly Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces, who are fighting
for their autonomy in the multilayered conflict, also gained ground
against the rebels.
In recent months, Syrian rebel factions in Azaz—which include
mainstream opposition fighters known as the Free Syrian Army along with
some ultraconservative Islamic insurgent factions—have been squeezed
between IS to the east and predominantly Kurdish forces to the west and
south, while Turkey restricts the flow of goods and people through the
border.
“With all these actors positioned to make land grabs in the area, and
rebels exhausted by months of fighting, the corridor is now on the
verge of collapse,” wrote Faysal Itani, a resident senior fellow with
the Atlantic Council’s Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East, in an
analysis for the center.
He said the loss of the Azaz corridor would be detrimental for
Turkey, which would no longer have proxy capability in northern Syria’s
most strategic province, and complicate U.S. efforts to fight IS in the
area.
They Turkey-backed Syrian National Coalition opposition group
appealed to world powers to provide urgent and immediate protection to
civilians and arm rebels to counter attacks by IS and the Syrian
government.
“By tightening the siege on the town of Marea, ISIS is following in
the footsteps of the Assad regime which uses sieges of towns and cities
as a weapon of war,” it said in a statement, using an alternative
acronym for the Islamic State group.
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