Amman: The Syrian regime’s army and its allies made advances in the southwest that bring it closer to the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights border, regime television and rebels said on Saturday.
This came as 26 civilians were killed in air strikes on Friday on areas controlled by Daesh in southern Syria’s Dara’a province, a war monitor said. Rami Abdul Rahman, head of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, said 11 children were among those killed in daylong strikes by regime and allied Russian aircraft on the last Daesh-held pocket in Dara’a.
The regime’s army, backed by a Russian air campaign, has been pushing into the edges of Quneitra province following an offensive last month that routed rebels in adjoining Dara’a province who were once backed by Washington, Jordan and Gulf states.
The offensive has restored Syrian regime control over a swathe of the southwest, strategic territory at the borders with Jordan and Israel.
The capture of a string of villages in a zone extending between the two southwestern provinces, announced by the army on Saturday, comes as a second group of rebels and their relatives were expected to evacuate to northern Syria.
A deal negotiated by Russian officers with rebels in the Quneitra area last week allows safe passage to rebels opposed to a return to state rule, while offering others who decide to stay Russian guarantees against regime encroachments in their own localities, rebels say.
It also allows the return of Syrian regime brigades that existed before the 2011 conflict back to where they were stationed near a 1974 demilitarised zone with Israel on the occupied Golan frontier.
More than 2,500 people, among them fighters from Islamist groups who have rejected the deal, left on Friday headed to opposition areas in northern Syria.
Other phases of the agreement, which includes the handover of weapons and the entry of Russian military police in some villages, were expected to be implemented in coming days, a rebel source said. Tens of thousands of people have been sheltering at the frontier since the Russian and Syrian aerial bombing campaign that the opposition called a scorched earth policy began one month ago.
Russia has been exerting pressure on the Syrian regime to facilitate the return of many of the displaced and has also lobbied the United Nations to send regular convoys of aid to ease the humanitarian crisis triggered by the offensive, UN officials said.
A senior Western diplomatic source said Moscow, which has reached understandings with Israel and Jordan that made it possible to move with the offensive, was keen to stabilise the border area to prove that its Syria intervention sought a political settlement to the seven-year-old conflict.
