BEIRUT —
More than a week of inter-rebel fighting in
Syria’s Turkish-held north has
killed 58 people, mostly combatants — battles that have allowed Al-Qaeda-linked
fighters to gain ground, a war monitor said Tuesday.
اضافة اعلان
The clashes since
October 8 have been among the deadliest in years, killing 48 rebel fighters and
10 civilians, the
Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
Fighting has taken
place in a volatile area near the Turkish border.
Those killed
include 28 fighters from the Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham alliance (HTS), according to
the Britain-based war monitor, which relies on sources inside Syria.
The HTS alliance
is led by Al-Qaeda’s former Syria affiliate.
On Tuesday, Turkey
deployed its forces near Azaz to act as a buffer between HTS and Turkey-backed
forces, in its first major response to the fighting that erupted 10 days ago,
according to the observatory and an AFP reporter.
Dozens of rebel
groups opposed to Syria’s President
Bashar Al-Assad are confined to areas of
northern and northwestern Syria, still evading government forces after more
than a decade of war.
The latest
fighting started this month between two rival pro-Turkish rebel groups, in the
town of Al-Bab in Aleppo province.
It then spread to
other areas, drawing in other factions — including HTS.
‘Alarmed’
HTS is widely seen as the strongest and best organized of the rebel
factions and dominates the nearby Idlib region, Syria’s last major rebel-held
area.
Last week, the
group captured the Afrin region from rival Turkish-backed rebels, advancing in
the area for the first time since civil war broke out in Syria in 2011.
The
US condemned
the HTS advance in a statement Tuesday.
“We are alarmed by
the recent incursion of HTS, a designated terrorist organization, into northern
Aleppo (province),” the US statement read. “HTS forces should be withdrawn from
the area immediately”.
HTS has leveraged
the latest bout of fighting to expand its zone of influence, in a move
green-lit by Turkey, which has never publicly backed it, the observatory said.
“HTS would not
have entered the area without Turkey’s consent,” said observatory chief Rami
Abdul Rahman.
Since Monday, it
has advanced towards the key town of Azaz, near the Turkish border further
north, as persistent inter-rebel fighting has torpedoed a truce that briefly
went into effect at the weekend.
Since 2011, the war in
Syria has killed nearly half a million people and driven more than half of the
country’s pre-war population from their homes.
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