Thousands flee Syria’s Homs city as opposition forces close in: War monitor 

Thousands of people have fled the Syrian city of Homs as antigovernment forces push their lightning offensive further south towards Damascus, according to a war monitor.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said on Friday that thousands of Homs residents started fleeing overnight towards the western coast, where embattled Syrian President Bashar al-Assad still maintains control, as the rebels advanced.

Rami Abdel Rahman, head of the UK-based monitoring group, said fighters led by the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) armed group were 5km (3 miles) “from the outskirts of Homs city” after capturing two towns – Rastan and Talbiseh – in the governorate of Homs.

Homs, a key crossroads city linking Damascus to al-Assad’s coastal heartlands, is 46km (29 miles) south of Hama, which HTS and allied fighters captured on Thursday, days after seizing the country’s prized second city Aleppo from government forces.

Samer AbdelJaber, head of emergency coordination at the UN’s World Food Programme, said renewed fighting in Syria has displaced about 280,000 people in about a week, warning numbers could swell to 1.5 million.

A Syrian army officer told the Reuters news agency that Russian bombing overnight had destroyed the Rastan bridge along the key M5 highway linking Hama to Homs.

Rastan and Talbiseh, which the rebels have reportedly captured, are located on the Homs side of the bridge.

Meanwhile, Israel launched air attacks on two border crossings between Syria and Lebanon, hitting the Syrian side of the Arida and Jousiyeh crossings.

Lebanon’s Transport Minister Ali Hamieh told Reuters they were important access routes to the Homs governorate.

The border attacks were confirmed by Syrian state news agency SANA and the Israeli military. The army claimed to have hit weapons transfer hubs and infrastructure used by Lebanese armed group Hezbollah, which has pledged backing for al-Assad and claims to have sent “supervising forces” to Homs.

As the opposition forces pressed on southwards, rebel military commander Hassan Abdel Ghani stated on Telegram that “hundreds” of fighters were en route to Homs, while the Syrian Ministry of Defence said the army was targeting “terrorist vehicles and gatherings” in Hama governorate with the backing of “joint Syrian-Russian warplanes”.

Homs, once dubbed the “capital of the revolution” because of the large-scale protests in the city when Syria’s uprising began in March 2011, came under government control in 2014 after two years of siege and bombardment.

The city has also seen violence against its Alawite community, with at least 100 people killed in attacks claimed by the al-Nusra Front, a previous iteration of HTS that had links to al-Qaeda.

The rebel advance on Homs comes as Syrian Foreign Minister Bassam Sabbagh meets with his Iraqi and Iranian counterparts in Iraq’s capital Baghdad on Friday.

A senior Iranian official told Reuters on Friday that Tehran would dispatch “missiles and drones” to Syria, sending more “military advisers” and “deploying forces” to support al-Assad.