Syrian rebels on Wednesday encircled the key central city of Hama “from three sides,” a war monitor said, despite a counteroffensive launched by government forces to retain control of the city.
Hama is strategically located in central Syria and, for the army, it is crucial to safeguarding the capital and seat of power, Damascus.
The fighting around Hama follows a lightning offensive by Islamist-led rebels who in a matter of days wrested swathes of territory, most significantly Syria’s second city Aleppo, from Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s grasp.
Photo: AFP
The rebels “have surrounded Hama city from three sides, and are now present at a distance of 3 to 4km from it,” the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
The UK-based observatory, which relies on a network of sources in Syria, said government forces were “left with only one exit toward Homs to the south.”
Key to the rebels’ successes since the start of the offensive last week was the takeover of Aleppo, which in more than a decade of war had never entirely fallen out of government hands.
Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, head of the Islamist rebel group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), on Wednesday visited Aleppo’s landmark citadel.
Images posted on the rebels’ Telegram channel showed al-Jolani waving to supporters from an open-top car as he visited the historic fortress.
In Hama, 36-year-old delivery driver Wassim said the sounds were “really terrifying” and the continuous bombing was clearly audible.
“I’ll stay home because I have nowhere else to flee to,” he said.
While the advancing rebels found little resistance earlier in their offensive, the fighting around Hama has been especially fierce.
Al-Assad ordered a 50 percent raise in career soldiers’ pay, as he seeks to bolster his forces for the counteroffensive, state news agency SANA reported.
A military source cited by SANA had earlier reported “fierce battles” against the rebels in northern Hama Province since morning, adding that “joint Syrian-Russian warplanes” were part of the effort.
The rebels launched their offensive on Wednesday last week, the same day a ceasefire took effect in the war between Israel and Hezbollah in neighboring Lebanon.
Hezbollah and Russia have been key backers of al-Assad’s government, but have been more recently mired in their own respective conflicts.
Russia, Iran and Turkey are in “close contact” over the conflict in Syria, Moscow said on Wednesday.
While Russia and Iran back al-Assad, Turkey has backed the opposition.
Turkey said that it might be too soon to expect large-scale returns to Aleppo from among the 3 million Syrian refugees currently on its soil.
“To those who say they wish to go back now, we say: ‘Wait, it’s not safe for the moment,’” Turkish Minister of the Interior Ali Yerlikaya said.
Until last week the war in Syria had been mostly dormant for several years, but analysts have said violence was bound to flare up as it was never truly resolved.
“Many policymakers thought, well, al-Assad won, there is no war,” said Rim Turkmani, director of the Syria Conflict Research Program at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
However, “we’ve been worrying about this for years, that the fact that there is no intense violence doesn’t mean that the conflict is over,” she said.
While the rebels might have advanced swiftly, it does not mean they would have the capacity to hold onto the territory they have captured.
Spearheading the rebel alliance is HTS, which is rooted in Syria’s al-Qaeda branch.
“It’s very well organized, very ideologically driven,” Turkmani said.
“However, they spread very quickly and very thin. And I think very quickly they’re going to realise it’s beyond their capacity to maintain these areas and, most importantly, to govern them,” she added.
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