BEIRUT: Thousands of people have been displaced and dozens killed in one of the worst flare-ups to rattle a precarious truce deal in northwestern Syria, a monitor said on Tuesday.
Twenty government troops and allied fighters were killed in attacks by a militant group on the edge of the Idlib region since Sunday, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
The latest casualties were five government and allied fighters killed on Tuesday near a planned buffer zone around rebel-held territory in neighbouring Idlib.
The Britain-based Observatory said the attack was led by Hurras al-Deen, an alliance formally linked to Al Qaeda that includes Syrian and foreign militants.
At least nine militant fighters were killed in the clashes, among the deadliest since a deal was reached in September last year to spare the region a massive government assault.
Regime bombardment near Khan Sheikhun, in Idlib province, also killed two civilians on Tuesday, raising the civilian death toll to 42 since February 9, the Observatory said.
The Idlib region is mainly controlled by the militants of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), a Syrian group led by former Al Qaeda fighters, after they pushed back smaller rebel outfits last month.
Under the September 17 deal, all fighters in the zone were supposed to withdraw their heavy weapons and militants including HTS and Hurras al-Deen were supposed to leave.
Syria force screens survivors: Meanwhile, US-backed forces in eastern Syria on Tuesday screened and treated truckloads of suspected militants and relatives who left a village where the IS group’s “caliphate” is making its last stand.
The Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) struggled to cope with the flow of people exiting the very last shred of a once-sprawling proto-state that claimed dominion over millions of people.
Several thousand of them are believed to remain in a last redoubt which has been shrunk to about half a square kilometre on the edge of Baghouz, a hamlet by the Euphrates river. SDF forces and medics were treating the last batch of more than 2,000 people who were trucked in from the front line to a desert screening point at night. — AFP
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