Islamist rebels captured a village on Syria’s Mediterranean coast for the first time and battled to hold territory abutting the nearby Turkish border taken from President Bashar al-Assad’s forces, activists said yesterday.

Video footage showed six fighters holding the black banner of the Ansar al-Sham brigade on a rocky beach, a symbolic rebel victory in the coastal province of Latakia that has been an Assad stronghold throughout three years of conflict.

“This is the first area of coast in Syria to be liberated,” said an activist who used the name Abu Bakr, referring to the beach and nearby village of Samra.

Latakia and neighbouring Tartous provinces together form the Mediterranean heartland of Assad’s minority Alawite faith and have remained loyal to him as he battles mainly Sunni Muslim rebels in a civil war which has killed more than 140,000 people.

After months of setbacks in central Syria, Islamist rebels launched an offensive on Friday into the Latakia region, taking the border crossing and the Armenian Christian village of Kasab. Since then, Assad has sent army and militia reinforcements, backed by air power, to repulse the rebels, leading to heavy fighting across the strip of territory along the Turkish border.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said 14 pro-Assad fighters and six rebels – mostly foreign jihadis – were killed yesterday fighting for a strategic hilltop close to Kasab. Seventy-five wounded rebels were treated in Turkey.

The ferocity of the fighting shows the significance Assad attaches to repelling the rebel thrust. Assad has lost control of much of the east and north but his army, backed by Shi’ite fighters from Hizbollah, has cleared rebels out of large areas around Damascus and near the Lebanese border.