Syrian insurgents advance in areas around captured town: monitor

[May 29, 2015]  BEIRUT (Reuters) - A Syrian insurgent alliance which has captured the last government-held town in the northwestern Idlib province made further advances on Friday, a monitoring group and fighters said.

The "Army of Fatah" which includes al Qaeda's Syria wing Nusra Front, the Islamist Ahrar al-Sham group and other factions, captured Ariha town on Thursday night as the Syrian military pulled back.

The Syrian army has lost large parts of Idlib province to insurgents since late March, when the provincial capital fell to the insurgent alliance, whose name is a reference to Islamic conquest.

By Friday the insurgents had advanced, capturing at least four villages close to Ariha in heavy clashes, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said and social media accounts linked to groups in the alliance reported.

The Syrian air force also carried out strikes on the area, the Observatory added. Syrian state television said on Thursday government forces had evacuated positions in Ariha and withdrawn to defensive positions outside after battling Nusra Front fighters.

The recent advances in the northwest have brought insurgents closer to the coastal Latakia province, President Bashar al-Assad's ancestral homeland and an area of importance to his government. Government forces and allied militia have increasingly focused on defending Syria's western flank which includes Latakia, Homs city and the capital Damascus further south.

The losses in Idlib have been compounded by sweeping advances by the Islamic State jihadist group into government-held areas of central Syria. The group seized the ancient city of Palmyra, or Tadmur, last week in the desert and took control of the last government-held border crossing with Iraq.

A Nusra Front video uploaded to YouTube claimed to show night-time clashes between insurgents and pro-government forces inside Ariha. Men were shown firing rifles in the dark and loud booms could be heard in the distance.

Another video uploaded claimed to show Ariha in daylight after the capture. Fighters could be seen walking in the streets in front of the local government complex as a man on a moped played a song from loudspeakers.

Small groups of men walked in the streets and bullet holes could be seen in some of the building facades. Reuters was not independently able to confirm the content of the videos.

(Reporting by Sylvia Westall in Beirut, additional reporting by Mostafa Hashem in Cairo; Editing by Angus MacSwan)

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