While the Islamist rebels were at the gates of Hama, Syria's fourth city, the army launched a counter-offensive on Wednesday, December 4, to push them back, said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (OSDH) . According to the NGO, “regime forces launched a counter-offensive after midnight” under air cover and were able to push back rebel coalition fighters about 10 kilometers from the city.
The official Syrian agency SANA said on Wednesday that the army was continuing its operations against “terrorist organizations” in the province of Hama. She added that “army units [étaient] engaged in violent clashes » with rebels to the northeast and northwest of the city. The OSDH, based in the United Kingdom but which has a vast network of sources in Syria, also reported “violent fighting” in progress.
Quoted by the SANA agency, a Syrian military source said Tuesday that “significant military reinforcements” had been dispatched to this strategic city in central Syria, on the road linking Aleppo to the capital, Damascus. Syrian television showed images of Hama overnight, where police and soldiers can be seen in deserted squares. According to the OSDH, the fighting also displaced “dozens of families” from several areas in the west and north of Hama province.
Read also | Article reserved for our subscribers Syria: Bashar Al-Assad trapped by his intransigence and the collapse of his regime
Read later
Russia, Iran and Turkey in “close contact”
The fighting, which left 602 dead in one week, including 104 civilians, according to the OSDH, is the first of this magnitude since 2020 in this country ravaged by civil war. As of Saturday, more than 48,500 people (more than half of them children) had been displaced in the regions of Aleppo and neighboring Idlib, according to the UN Office of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). ).
The groups of fighters, whose main component is the Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham (HTC), an emanation of Al-Qaeda breaking with the jihadist movement, launched a dazzling offensive last week which allowed them to seize Aleppo, Syria's second city, in the north, over which regime forces have completely lost control for the first time since the start of the civil war in 2011, with the exception of its neighborhoods northern Kurds. The loss of Aleppo was a major setback for the regime of Bashar Al-Assad.
Read also | Article reserved for our subscribers Why the capture of Aleppo by Islamist rebels is an embarrassing setback for Russia
Read later
Furthermore, the heads of Russian, Iranian and foreign diplomacy, key players in the war in Syria, said on Wednesday that they “close contacts” to stabilize the situation in the face of the rebel offensive, according to Moscow, an ally of the Syrian regime. “The foreign ministers of the three guarantor countries” of the Astana process, a negotiation format on Syria, “Russia, Iran and Turkey are in close contact”according to statements by the spokesperson for Russian diplomacy, Maria Zakharova.
