BEIRUT // ISIL fighters, emboldened by a string of battlefield victories, advanced on Thursday to the gates of the Syrian city of Hassakeh after intense fighting with regime troops.
Despite nine months of US-led air strikes, the militants have made new territorial gains in both Iraq and Syria in recent weeks, including the ancient Syrian city of Palmyra and the capital of Iraq’s vast Anbar province, Ramadi.
Now the militants have advanced to “500 metres away from the entrance of Hassakeh, after fierce clashes against regime forces south of the city,” said Rami Abdel Rahman, director of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based monitoring group.
He said ISIL had seized all military posts in that area of northeastern Syria, including an unfinished prison building and a power plant, after at least six suicide bombers struck on Wednesday.
Regime helicopters, meanwhile, had dropped barrel bombs on militant positions, he said.
Elsewhere, at least 14 civilians, including seven children, were killed on Thursday when regime helicopters dropped barrel bombs on northern Aleppo province, the Observatory said.
The attacks came as part of an intensified air campaign over Aleppo in recent weeks, despite an international outcry over the civilian deaths.
In the village of Hayyan, north of Aleppo city, barrel bombs killed two elderly men, a woman, and five children from a single family, said the monitoring group.
North of the provincial capital, six civilians, including two children, were killed when barrel bombs were dropped on the village of Deir Jamal.
The Observatory, which relies on a network of activists and fighters on the ground in Syria, said many were critically wounded or still stuck under the rubble.
According to the Observatory, Syria’s regime wants to “punish” civilians living in rebel areas, particularly after its recent losses of territory to an opposition alliance led by Al Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate, Jabhat Al Nusra.
Control of Hassakeh city is split between regime and Kurdish forces, who have fought ISIL elsewhere in the province, which is also called Hassakeh.
If ISIL seizes the city of Hassakeh it would be the second Syrian provincial capital to fall under its control, after Raqqa, the group’s bastion in northern Syria.
It would also be the third provincial capital lost by the regime. The northwestern city of Idlib was seized by other opposition fighters in March.
Iran and Iraq have deployed thousands of fighters to Syria in recent weeks to help the regime defend Damascus and its surroundings, a security source said on Wednesday.
“Around 7,000 Iranian and Iraqi fighters have arrived in Syria over the past few weeks and their first priority is the defence of the capital. The larger contingent is Iraqi,” the source said.
Iran is a key ally of the Syrian government, and has provided Damascus with financial and military support.
But this support has not prevented the government loss of territory in several parts of the country in recent months to both ISIL and the Al Nusra-led alliance.
On Thursday, state television reported that Syria’s defence minister had visited army units to the east of the city of Homs, in what appeared to be the latest in a series of morale-boosting trips by senior officials to military outposts.
General Fahad Jassim Al Freij, who is armed forces deputy commander as well as defence minister, told troops in the eastern Homs countryside that he was confident in their ability to defend Syria from what he called “terrorism and its supporters”.
Twenty-seven regime fighters and 26 ISIL militants were killed in fighting around Hassakeh on Wednesday, the Observatory said.
All electricity and methods of communications in the city have been cut off, said activist Arin Shekhmos, citing residents who fled the provincial capital.
Other residents have moved to the northern and western Kurdish-controlled parts of Hassakeh city following ISIL mortar fire, he said from Qamishli, further north-east.
The Al Watan newspaper, which is close to the government, said ISIL had begun a “violent attack on Hassakeh” but criticised Kurdish forces for failing to support regime troops.
ISIL began its assault on Hassakeh on May 30 and launched a simultaneous offensive against other opposition fighters in the northern province of Aleppo.
The attacks follow the extremists’ capture last month of Palmyra and its 2,000-year-old Unesco World Heritage site in central Syria. The group has also expanded its control along the Syrian-Iraqi frontier.
More than 220,000 people have been killed in Syria in total since anti-government protests broke out in March 2011 and escalated into a full-blown civil war that brought foreign extremists streaming into the country.
In Turkey, Syria’s opposition National Coalition met with UN peace envoy Staffan de Mistura on Thursday, as part of “ongoing discussions about a political solution,” a coalition spokesman said.
Meanwhile, in an interview with Al Jazeera aired late on Wednesday, the head of Al Nusra said he saw no solution soon to the group’s conflict with its rival ISIL.
“There is no solution between us and them in the meantime, or in the foreseeable future. We hope they repent to God and return to their senses ... if not then there is nothing but fighting between us,” Abu Mohamad Al Golani told the channel. It was not clear where or when the rare interview took place.
* Agence France-Presse with additional reporting by Reuters