near Homs on Wednesday.
Syrian government continued its offensive on
Syrian rebels on Tuesday as it seeks to retake
rebel-head areas despite reports of civilian
casualties in its quest.
Government aircraft scattered leaflets over
the northern province of Idlib on Wednesday,
calling on rebels to hand themselves over and
urging foreign fighters to return to their
homelands, as regime troops pressed on with
the battle to retake areas they had lost to the
opposition.
The call came after another bloody day in
Syria. The British-based Syrian Observatory
for Human Rights, which has a network of
activists on the ground, said 40 civilians and
70 fighters — both regime troops and rebels
— were killed in clashes nationwide on
Tuesday.
President Bashar Assad's regime has called
on opposition fighters in the past to lay down
their arms, and it was unlikely Wednesday's
call would be heeded, either by Syrians or
foreign fighters battling in the province.
"Abandon your weapons and return to your
family," said one leaflet, aimed at the
foreigner fighters. "You have been tricked," it
read, according to a photograph of the leaflet
obtained by the Observatory. An Idlib-based
activist corroborated the leaflets.
Another leaflet gave instructions to rebels —
foreign and local — to approach Syrian
government checkpoints slowly and wave the
paper in the air in a sign of surrender.
The battle for the Idlib province is just one of
a series of clashes flaring lately as a
concerted push by government forces seeks
to dislodge rebels who have seized control of
large swathes of the country.
The Observatory also reported clashes on
Wednesday in the northern province of
Aleppo, which abuts the Turkish border and
serves as a rebel gateway for bringing in
weapons and supplies.
There was also fighting in towns on the
outskirts of the capital Damascus, and the
southern province of Daraa. Syrian troops,
alongside fighters from the Lebanese Shiite
Hezbollah group, were encircling the
neighbourhoods of Khaldiyeh and Bab Houd
in the central city of Homs, which rebels have
held for the past year.
"The war here is now from building to
building. They are trying to take the area a
block at a time," said activist Tariq
Badrakhan, speaking via Skype from the city.
He said Syrian forces were "cleaning" the
area of rebel fighters by firing mortar shells at
buildings, with the heaviest shelling
occurring at dawn.
In Idlib province, rebels have besieged the
provincial capital, also called Idlib, over the
past two weeks, causing food shortages and
price hikes, an activist based in the city,
Mohammad Kanaan, said via Skype.
Kanaan said rebels had set up checkpoints,
blocking some roads with large rocks and
destroying others, and preventing food and
other basic supplies from entering, in an
effort to force the civilians to leave so they
could storm the city.
There have been fuel shortages and prices for
basic goods have been rising across Syria,
but Kanaan said it was worse in Idlib because
of the rebel siege.
"Residents are pleading with the Free Syria
Army to loosen their grip, but they are trying
to pressure people to leave Idlib," Kanaan
said. He said there were few places the
civilians could go as the city was already
swelled with people who had fled from
violence elsewhere, and that government
troops often shell nearby rebel-held areas.
Hundreds of thousands of Syrian civilians
have been internally displaced because of the
fighting, and the UN counts another 1.7
million Syrian refugees have fled to
neighbouring Jordan, Turkey and Lebanon,
many of them children.
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