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by James Tweedie
THE Syrian army regained the initiative in central Hama province yesterday with a counteroffensive against al-Qaida-linked extremists.
Led by elite troops, the army launched a two-pronged attack towards Taybat Al-Imam.
The town is at the centre of this week’s 10-mile advance by Jund al-Aqsa, a branch of al-Qaida’s Levant Conquest Front (LCF).
Troops liberated Iskandariyah to the south-east and cleared much of nearby Ma’ardes after capturing it on Thursday.
On Thursday night, the army drove back several attacks on the village of Maan, in the north-east corner of the salient, where Jund al-Aqsa massacred 21 civilians in 2014, 14 of them women.
But unconfirmed reports the same day said the terrorists had slaughtered 90 civilians in Suran, which fell late on Wednesday.
Jund al-Aqsa’s offensive, seemingly intended to divert troops from the crucial Aleppo front to the north-east, had come within three miles of the city of Hama, home to 300,000 people.
In Aleppo, Syria’s largest city, Republican Guard troops and Lebanese Hezbollah guerillas attacked the south of the LCF-held military colleges complex in the south-eastern Ramouseh district.
With government troops having already recaptured much of the Air Force Technical College on the north side of the insurgent breakthrough into the east of the city, the breach is now less than one mile wide.
Running south of the complex, the main LCF supply road to the 5,000 insurgents occupying east Aleppo has been cut.
On Thursday, the army defeated an attempt by the Fatah Halab (Aleppo Conquest) alliance of insurgent factions to recapture the northern Castello Road route into the city.
Meanwhile, some 300 militants and their families evacuated the Damascus suburb of Moadamiyeh in the latest of a series of truces opposed by United Nations peace envoy Staffan de Mistura.
Yesterday, 62 gunmen, 79 women and 162 children were taken with their belongings to temporary lodgings in nearby Harjalleh.
Under last week’s deal, 4,000 people, including 700 insurgents, from the town of 28,000 will be transported to LCF-controlled Idlib province.
