ISIL moves west to attack Syrian army in Homs: monitor

BEIRUT - Reuters

AFP Photo

Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) fighters attacked a military airport in Syria's Homs province on March 23 as they pushed on with an offensive against government strongholds towards the west, a monitoring group said.
   
Skirmishes by ISIL -- which is strongest in the northeast and east -- into the provinces of Homs, Hama and even Damascus pose a fresh challenge for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
   
Syria's army has carved a bulwark of territory from Damascus through the cities of Homs and Hama to the western coast by defeating other, less powerful militias including rebels fighting under the banner of the Free Syrian Army.
   
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which tracks the violence through a network of sources in the country, said ISIL attacked a military airport in Tadmur, a town in Homs province, early on Monday.
   
Syrian officials could not immediately be reached for comment, and the fighting was not reported on state media.
   
The offensive followed a three-day battle that erupted on Friday further west in Hama around Sheikh Hilal village, the Observatory said. ISIL was trying to cut the road from Hama to Aleppo, once Syria's most populous city, it added.
   
Observatory head Rami Abdulrahman, said 74 soldiers in Hama had been killed by ISIL, which he speculated launched both attacks to raise morale after losses to Kurdish forces in the northeast.
   
Around 200,000 people have been killed since 2011 in Syria's civil war, which pits Assad against a range of rebels including jihadist groups such as Islamic State and al Qaeda's Nusra Front. A U.S-led coalition is bombarding ISIL in both Syria and Iraq.
   
Kurdish forces, backed by coalition air strikes, defeated ISIL in the northern Syria town of Kobani this year and other areas in the northeast.
   
Syrian state television said Syria's army killed 19 ISIL fighters on Monday in the eastern province of Deir al-Zor, one of the insurgent group's strongholds.
   
Government supporters posted a video on YouTube on Saturday showing trucks covered in the national flag carrying coffins of people said to have been killed fighting ISIL in Hama province.
   
The footage was said to be taken in Salamiyah, a religiously-diverse town east of Hama that has been attacked by jihadist brigades.
   
An ISIL fighter told Reuters on condition of anonymity that the Hama campaign aimed to eventually take Salamiyah. "The ultimate goal is liberate Salamiya and Hama but it will not happen before ISIL is 100 percent ready," he said.