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ISIS Militants Fight Rebels in North Syria Strongholds | ASHARQ AL-AWSAT English Archive 2005 -2017
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ISIS billboards are seen along a street in Raqqa, eastern Syria, which is controlled by the ISIS. REUTERS/Nour Fourat


Fierce clashes between the ISIS group and rebels erupted in a town in northeastern Syria Saturday, a monitor and an activist said, after jihadists entered a Syrian opposition stronghold near Marea cutting a main supply route.

“Heavy clashes took place overnight between ISIS fighters and rebels inside the walls of Marea town,” the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said, as the extremist group built on its most significant advance near the Turkish border in two years.

Early Saturday, ISIS fighters staged two suicide bombings targeting “opposition forces” near Marea using tanks and two car bombs, ISIS said via its news agency, Aamaq.

The advance has besieged more than 160,000 civilians are trapped and forced the evacuation of one of the few remaining hospitals in the area, run by the international medical organization Doctors Without Borders.

Following the suicide bombings, ISIS militants entered Marea and fighting began inside the town, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based opposition media outfit that tracks Syria’s civil war.

The territorial gains around the rebel strongholds of Marea and Azaz, north of Aleppo city, are a blow to the Syrian rebels, who have been struggling to retain a foothold in the region while being squeezed by opponents from all sides. They also demonstrated the ISIS group’s ability to stage major offensives and capture new areas, despite a string of recent losses in Syria and Iraq.

The ISIS offensive targeting Syrian opposition strongholds near the Turkish border began Thursday night.

On Friday, militants of the group captured six villages near Azaz, triggering intense fighting that trapped tens of thousands of civilians unable to flee to safety while Turkey’s border remains closed. A few hundred fled west to the Kurdish-held enclave of Afrin.

People are “terrified for their lives,” the International Rescue Committee (IRC) said in a statement. The group said it has received confirmed reports that at least four entire families, including women and children, were killed Friday on the outskirts of the town of Azaz.

The IRC runs centers for both children and women in Azaz and provides clean water and sanitation to a camp supporting 8,500 people. More than half the camp’s population has fled to find safety elsewhere in the town, it said. The IRC also relocated its staff from the centers and camp to shelter to safer areas of Azaz until the situation enables them to return.

The U.N. refugee agency said it was “deeply concerned” about the fighting affecting thousands of vulnerable civilians.

“Fleeing civilians are being caught in crossfire and are facing challenges to access medical services, food, water and safety,” it said in a statement Saturday.

The advances brought the militants to within few kilometers of the rebel-held town of Azaz and cut off supplies to Marea further south. Marea has long been considered a bastion of moderate Syrian revolutionary forces fighting to topple President Bashar Assad.

Azaz, which hosts tens of thousands of internally displaced people, lies north of Aleppo city, which has been divided between a rebel-held east and government-held west.

A route known as the Azaz corridor links rebel-held eastern Aleppo with Turkey. That has been a lifeline for the rebels since 2012, but a government offensive backed by Russian air power and regional militias earlier this year dislodged rebels from parts of Azaz and severed their corridor between the Turkish border and Aleppo.

The predominantly Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), who are fighting for their autonomy in the multilayered conflict, also gained ground against the rebels.

In recent months, Syrian rebel factions in Azaz — which include mainstream opposition fighters known as the Free Syrian Army along with some ultraconservative insurgent factions — have been squeezed between ISIS to the east and predominantly Kurdish forces to the west and south, while Turkey restricts the flow of goods and people through the border.