Syrian government forces backed by Lebanese Hizbollah militants are tightening their grip on a key rebel district in central Syria, activists said yesterday.

The military moves came a day after they expelled rebels from a 13th century landmark mosque they controlled for more than a year.

State-run Syrian TV broadcast live coverage from Khaldiyeh, an embattled northern neighbourhood in Homs, where the army has been advancing.

Video showed extensive destruction. Activists said most of the buildings in the mainly residential district were no longer fit to live in.

Elsewhere, an opposition group said the death toll from nearly two weeks of clashes between al-Qaeda-linked fighters and Kurdish militiamen in northeastern Syria stands at 120.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the dead include 79 fighters from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant and Jabhat al-Nusra, both al-Qaeda-affiliated rebel groups. The group monitors the Syrian war through a network of activists on the ground.

This latest round of fighting flared in Ras al-Ayn on July 6 in the predominantly Kurdish Hassakeh province in the north, near the Turkish border. Kurdish gunmen are fighting to expel the militants, whom they see as a threat.

After capturing the strategic town of Qusair near the Lebanon border last month, government troops launched an offensive on rebel-held areas in Homs, Syria’s third largest city, late in June. They have been pushing into Khaldiyeh and other neighbourhoods in the Old City that have been under opposition control since 2011.