Forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad retook a central district in the city of Homs yesterday, driving a wedge between two isolated pockets of rebel resistance in Syria’s third largest city, fighters and activists said.
The recapture of Wadi al-Sayeh, which links the besieged rebel stronghold in Khalidiyah to the opposition-held old city, appears to be part of a series of carefully focused counter-offensives that mark a shift from the indiscriminate campaigns earlier in the two-year-old conflict.
Homs is a link in the corridor connecting Assad’s Damascus powerbase with the traditional Mediterranean heartland of his minority Alawite community. It was an early centre of the mainly Sunni Muslim uprising against four decades of Assad family rule.
Following recent gains in rural areas around Homs, Assad’s forces surrounded the towns of Baida and Maqreb on the road to the coastal city of Banias yesterday, activists said, the latest stage in a campaign to secure the corridor.
They also seized Qaysa town on the eastern edge of Damascus, part of a steady move north from airport on the city’s southeastern edge which would create a line of control locking down the eastern approaches to the city and close off weapons supplies from the Jordanian border.
A call issued by several activists in the area warned the disparate rebel forces to pull together or face defeat.
“If you do not unite under one flag the regime is going to hunt you down, one brigade after another,” it said.
Assad has lost control of much of northern and eastern Syria in the fighting, which the UN says has killed 70,000 people, and is battling rebels in most cities. But he says his forces still hold the upper hand.
On Monday, his Prime Minister escaped assassination when a bomb struck his convoy, killing six people. The President appeared two days later, touring an electricity power station and saying he would not be forced into hiding.
“This is a challenge to us to cower in fear or remain fearless. We will not be afraid,” Assad said.
In Homs, a rebel fighter told Reuters by Skype that pro-Assad forces from the paramilitary National Defence Army were making gains.
“They managed to take large parts of Wadi al-Sayeh – the besieged area is being divided as we speak,” he said.
Before moving in, the fighters had blown up buildings. The British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the operation to recapture Wadi al-Sayeh was coordinated by forces from Iran and Lebanon’s Hizbollah militant group, both allies of Assad.
The Homs rebel said men captured by rebels reported being trained in Iran and the rebels also heard Lebanese accents among some fighters speaking on intercepted radio messages.
Iran and Hizbollah have denied sending forces to fight alongside Assad’s troops but Hizbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah has been increasingly open about the group’s presence in Syria, where he says it is defending Lebanese and Shi’ite communities from attack by Sunni Muslim rebels.
In coastal Banias province, activists and residents said Assad’s forces were surrounding the towns of Baida and Maqreb and firing mortar rounds at them.
Poll: Americans want US to keep out of Syria conflict
Most Americans do not want the US to intervene in Syria’s civil war even if the Government there uses chemical weapons, a Reuters/Ipsos poll has shown in a clear message to the White House as it considers how to respond to the worsening crisis.
Only 10 per cent of those surveyed in the online poll said the US should become involved in the fighting. Sixty-one per cent opposed getting involved.
The figure favoring intervention rose to 27 per cent when respondents were asked what the US should do if President Bashar al-Assad’s forces used chemical weapons. Forty-four per cent would be opposed.
“Particularly given Afghan-istan and the 10th anniversary of Iraq, there is just not an appetite for intervention,” said Ipsos pollster Julia Clark.
The rebellion against Assad’s Government has resulted in 70,000 dead and created more than 1.2 million refugees since it erupted in 2011.
President Barack Obama has shied away from deep US involvement, although he declared last year that the use or deployment of chemical weapons by Assad’s government would cross a “red line”.
Obama said on Tuesday there was evidence those weapons had been used, but too much is still unknown for Washington to do more than provide the non-lethal aid it is already sending to the Syrian rebels.