Syrian forces widen offensive

AMMAN/BEIRUT: Syrian government forces widened their offensive in the country´s southwest on Sunday to Quneitra province, a region adjoining the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, a war monitor and rebel sources said.

Government forces, backed by the Russian military, have captured most of the southwest´s Deraa province in a push that began in June.Rebels still hold a strip straddling Deraa and Quneitra provinces which adjoins the occupied Golan Heights.Islamic State-affiliated militants also occupy a pocket on the Jordanian border.

At the same time, a few hundred Syrian rebel fighters and their families were preparing to leave Deraa city, the birthplace of revolt against President Bashar al-Assad, to be taken on buses to opposition-held areas in the north under a surrender deal agreed last week.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights and rebels said jets, which they believed to be Russian, bombed an opposition-held village in Quneitra province in the first such aerial strike in around a year.

The Observatory said the forces had seized the village of Mashara, about 11 km (7 miles) from the Golan frontier, after heavy shelling, and were now trying to capture elevated land south of the village with shelling and air strikes.

But a rebel official in Quneitra denied Syrian forces had taken the village and said fighting continued.“Over 28 (air) strikes struck Mashara and intense artillery and missile bombardment,” Suhaib al-Ruhail said.

The violence is taking place around 4 km from the line marking the start of the United Nations Disengagement Observer Force zone, an area monitored by a UN force since 1974 in the wake of the Arab-Israeli War.

Israel has threatened a “harsh response” to any attempt by Syrian forces to deploy in that zone. Israel does not want its enemies Iran and Hezbollah, both allies of Assad, to move forces near its border.US President Donald Trump is to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday in Helsinki, when Syria is expected to be high on the agenda.

Ahead of the summit, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met Putin in Moscow and on Sunday spoke to Trump about Iran and Syria.A string of towns and villages in Deraa province have accepted surrender deals, opposition sources in touch with rebel negotiators said, leaving only two main towns under rebel control.

Under some of these deals, Russian military police would oversee local security - rather than Syrian government forces - and rebels would become part of Russia-supervised local security forces.

Deraa city was the scene of the first major peaceful protests against Assad´s authoritarian rule in March 2011 which spiralled into a war now estimated to have killed half a million people.

On Sunday fighters began to leave the Deraa al-Balad neighbourhood which had been under rebel control for years. Under the recent surrender deal rebels would hand over weapons, and fighters who do not wish to live under state rule would be transferred out.