Syrian government forces and their Lebanese Hizbollah allies seized control of the border town of Qusair yesterday, a severe setback to rebel fighters battling to overthrow President Bashar al-Assad.

Qusair victory secures important corridor through central province of Homs for Assad’s army

Two weeks of heavy fighting reduced much of the town to piles of concrete, whole blocks flattened by shelling, with glass and rubble littering the roads as tired, delighted Syrian soldiers gathered at the bullet-riddled clock tower.

Street after deserted street lay in ruins, windows blown out, facades crumpled and trees blackened and burnt. The dome of the local mosque was damaged by rocket fire, and the walls of a church smashed open.

“We will not hesitate to crush with an iron fist those who attack us... their fate is surrender or death,” the Syrian armed forces command said in statement.

“We will continue our string of victories until we regain every inch of Syrian land.”

The fall of Qusair, which lies on a cross-border supply route with Lebanon, might make it harder to convince both sides to attend a proposed peace conference in the coming weeks, with Assad’s fortunes on the rise and the opposition in disarray.

Signalling the diplomatic difficulties, international envoy for Syria Lakhdar Brahimi said in Geneva that the date for the conference had slipped back to July from June.

“The only sticking point is... the Syrian component of the conference,” he said after meeting US and Russian officials. In a frank assessment of their defeat, an opposition group from Qusair said more than 500 rebels had died in two weeks of combat, with a further 1,000 wounded, leaving just 400 outgunned men struggling to hold onto the town.

Facing determined Hizbollah guerrillas from neighbouring Lebanon, who swung the fight Assad’s way, the surviving rebel fighters decided to escape in the night through a corridor that the attackers said they had deliberately left open to encourage flight.

Some bodies still lay in the street; at least three men, sporting long beards, appeared to have been executed.

The capture of Qusair secures an important corridor through the central province of Homs, which links the Syrian capital Damascus to the coastal heartland of Assad’s minority Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shi’ite Islam.

Bolstered by his Iranian and Russian backers, Assad’s forces have launched a series of recent counter-offensives against mainly Sunni Muslim rebels battling to overthrow him and end his minority Alawite family’s four-decade grip on power.