Government forces flushed opposition fighters from their last redoubts in northwestern Syria near the Turkish frontier today, capturing two villages and restoring government control over the border crossing, activists and state media said.
The military's advances fully reversed the gains rebels had made during their three-month campaign in Latakia province, the rugged coastal region that is the ancestral heartland of President Bashar Assad. The counteroffensive's success is the latest blow to the rebels, who have suffered a string of bitter recent setbacks in Syria's more than three-year-old civil war.
Islamic rebel factions launched their surprise assault in Latakia in March, pushing south from the Turkish border to seize a string of villages in the lush, mountainous terrain.
The military, nervous about an incursion in a bastion of government support, dispatched reinforcements to blunt the rebel advance and eventually turn the tide.
After months of bloody clashes, army troops backed by fighters from the Lebanese Shiite military group Hezbollah seized the seaside hamlet of Samra today before also taking the village of Kassab and its adjacent border crossing, said Rami Abdurrahman, the director of the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
He said there were minor clashes still taking place west of Kassab, a predominantly Armenian village whose residents fled after the rebels seized control.
The Syrian army command issued a statement saying that it "restored security and stability to Kassab." It also said the operation "smashes the illusions" of the rebels securing a sea port in Samra or a buffer zone along the border to use as "a base for launching terrorist acts against the Syrian people."
Lebanon-based Al-Mayadeen TV, which has a reporter embedded with Syrian troops, broadcast live footage from Kassab that showed a blown-out stone building with a smoldering wooden staircase. Soldiers in camouflage uniforms milled in the streets, and the rocky hills typical of the area could be seen in the background.
