Syrian insurgents have entered towns north of the country’s third largest city, Homs, sweeping along a highway that eventually leads to the capital, Damascus, in a lightning-fast advance that has shaken the Middle East.
Militants spearheaded by the group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) took control of the city of Hama on Thursday before moving south, swiftly capturing two key towns on the road south of the city before arriving in Al-Dar al-Kabera, a town 8km from the centre of Homs.
The Russian embassy in Damascus instructed Russian nationals to leave Syria, in a rare show of alarm. Moscow has remained a key ally of Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, including providing military support.
Video from the opposition-aligned Aleppo Today channel showed air strikes targeting Talbiseh on the road between Hama and Homs shortly after it was claimed by insurgents. The defence ministry in Damascus said Russian and Syrian military aircraft were responsible for air strikes on the Hama countryside, while a strike attributed to forces from Moscow destroyed a bridge along the highway leading into Homs.
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Speaking to reporters outside a mosque in Istanbul, the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, offered a message of support to the insurgency. He had previously offered to “discuss shaping the future of Syria”, together with Assad, he said, “but we received no response”.
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The foreign ministers of Turkey, Iran and Russia are expected to meet on Saturday on the sidelines of a forum in Doha for an urgent meeting on Syria.
The city of Homs sits at a key juncture close to the Lebanese border, connecting the road to Damascus with a highway to the coastal communities, Assad’s heartland and a site of Russian naval bases. Homs witnessed some of the fiercest fighting during earlier phases of Syria’s civil war over a decade ago, with rebel forces engaged in years-long street battles the army and allied Syrian militia forces, as well as the Lebanese militant group Hizbullah.
Insurgents have called for the people of Homs to rise up against the regime, telling them “your time has come” in a message circulated online, as thousands fled south to Damascus or west to the coastal province of Latakia. Lebanese officials said they had closed all but one of their border crossings into Syria, while Jordan also closed its one crossing for passengers and people into Syrian territory.
Forces loyal to Damascus appeared to be in retreat across the country, with Assad increasingly losing his grip on major cities in Syria.
In the eastern provincial capital of Deir ez-Zor, Reuters and the Turkish state news agency Anadolu reported that a US-backed coalition of Kurdish and local Arab forces had taken control of the city after Syrian government forces and Iran-backed militias withdrew. Video showed the coalition, known as the Syrian Democratic Forces, driving military trucks through the centre of Deir ez-Zor.
The Deir ez-Zor military council, an Arab-majority militia that fights with the SDF, said their fighters had deployed in the city and west of the Euphrates river “in order to protect our people” from Islamic State fighters and Turkish-backed rebel forces active in the area. Unrest also swept two provinces south of the capital, as bands of local rebel fighters seized a security checkpoint and armed vehicles in the province of Daraa. In neighbouring Suwayda province, local media showed people climbing on top of tanks after Syrian army forces withdrew from a remote area north of the restive provincial capital.
Video from the city of Suwayda, a place where protests against Assad’s rule have increased in recent years, showed people striking a poster with the president’s face and taking control of a local police station.
Fighting to take Homs is expected to prove pivotal in the insurgents’ efforts to sweep south towards the capital. In little over a week their advance saw them rapidly take control of Aleppo, Syria’s second city, as well as full control of Hama after a rapid retreat by Syrian government forces. The unexpected advance marks the first time that both cities have been fully under opposition control since a popular uprising against Assad in 2011 then spilt over into a bloody civil war. – Guardian