Pro-govt forces capture west Syria village from IS jihadists

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BEIRUT, Nov 17, (Agencies): The Syrian army has seized a village from Islamic State in western Syria, state media and a group monitoring the war reported on Tuesday, retaking territory in an area where the jihadist group had recently advanced near a vital north-south highway.

The captured village, al-Hadath, is about 30 km (20 miles) east of the highway linking the cities of Damascus and Homs. Islamic State was reported to have captured the nearby village of Maheen on Nov 1. Rami Abdulrahman, director of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group, said heavy clashes were under way between government forces and Islamic State fighters at Hawareen, which adjoins Maheen.

A newsflash on state TV said government forces were successfully advancing towards Hawareen, Maheen, and Qarayatain, which Islamic State seized from government control in August. US Secretary of State John Kerry said on Tuesday his country is starting an operation with Turkey to finish securing the northern Syrian border. “The entire border of northern Syria — 75 percent of it has now been shut off. And we are entering an operation with the Turks to shut off the other remaining 98 kilometers,” he said in an interview with CNN. Kerry said on Tuesday increased coordination with Russia in the fight against Islamic State militants would require progress in the political process to end the Syrian war.

Kerry, who arrived in Paris on Monday to pay respects to victims of Friday’s militant attacks, said agreements reached last week at Vienna peace talks on Syria, meant the country could be “weeks away, conceivably, of a big transition”. Speaking to reporters after meetings French President Francois Hollande and Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius in Paris, Kerry referred to independently conducted US and Russian air strikes in Syria. “At the moment, it’s matter of making certain we are hitting the right targets and we are not running any risk of conflict among ourselves,” he said. “But it’s possible that if the political process moves more rapidly, there could be greater level of exchange of information and so forth.

“Iran, Russia ready for a ceasefire, the United States ready for ceasefire,” he said. “But there needs to be legitimacy to this process. So the faster Russia and Iran give life to this process, the faster the violence can taper down and we can isolate DAESH (Islamic State) and al Nusra and begin to do what our strategy has always set out to do.” He told CNN that there was now an opportunity to make a quick breakthrough. “(It) gives us an opportunity to perhaps get a ceasefire in place within the next three, four, five weeks. And then be able to, with the political process, work with other parties to again squeeze harder on DAESH,” he said. Meanwhile, Russia’s foreign minister is criticizing the United States for what he says is a contradictory and confusing policy in Syria.

In remarks in a Russian TV documentary shown Tuesday, Sergey Lavrov said that analysis of US attacks on Islamic State militants in Syria over the past year indicates that the attacks are sparing the IS units that would pose the most threat to the Syrian army and Syrian President Bashar Assad.

Lavrov said this means that Washington is effectively “sitting on two chairs.” “They want IS to weaken Assad as soon as possible so that he leaves one way or another, but they do not want IS to strengthen too much, either, because it may grab power afterward,” Lavrov said, according to Russian news agencies. The documentary was aired in Russia’s East and is to be shown later in the day in Moscow.

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