Islamic State fighters drove Syrian government forces from a town in the west of the country yesterday, as fighting intensified despite a flurry of international diplomacy and talks between regional rivals.

The jihadists’ advance came as Russian warplanes and Syrian forces supported by them stepped up assaults against insurgents in west and northwest Syria, and the United States separately sought to increase pressure on Islamic State.

The fighting tempered any expectation of progress towards a political solution to the four-year civil war, with warring sides and their foreign backers refusing to back down in a conflict where the world’s major military powers except China are directly involved.

Washington said last week it would for the first time station ground troops in Syria to advise and assist rebels fighting Islamic State.

Talks between world powers in Vienna, meanwhile, adjourned with calls for a nationwide ceasefire but key differences remained between rivals backing oppos-ing sides.

In a fierce assault that began by detonating two suicide car bombs, Islamic State militants took the town of Maheen in the southwest of Homs province from government forces, a group monitoring the war said.

Some 50 fighters on the government side were killed, and clashes raged afterwards on the outskirts of a nearby mostly Christian town, Sadad, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

Islamic State confirmed the advance, which brought it within 20 km of the north-south highway linking Damascus to Syria’s other main cities Homs, Hama and Aleppo. The Observatory’s Rami Abdulrahman said the attack might have been a response to pressures the group is under elsewhere including in northern province Aleppo.