BEIRUT/DAMASCUS/PARIS: Regime troops and rebels clashed across Syria yesterday, a watchdog said, as opposition fighters withdrew from the besieged town of Al-Haffe after eight days of intense shelling.

At least 15 people were killed in violence across Syria, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. In Al-Haffe, in Latakia province on the Mediterranean, rebels withdrew in what they described as a tactical move aimed at sparing the lives of residents under shellfire.

The rebel Free Syrian Army's (FSA) military council said the wounded were evacuated along with women and children, adding its fighters retreated "to avoid falling into the regime's civil war trap."

UN observers came under fire in a village near Al-Haffe on Tuesday after government supporters surrounded their vehicles as they were trying to reach the besieged town, a UN official said.

State news agency SANA quoted regime officials as saying Al-Haffe was "cleansed" of terrorists.

"The authorities pursued the remaining terrorists in the villages surrounding Al-Haffe" where they "killed and arrested a number of them", SANA said, adding government forces also sustained casualties. Elsewhere, troops shelled the central city of Homs and its suburbs, including the rebel bastions of Rastan and Khaldiyeh. They also shelled Houla, site of a massacre in late May of 108 people. "Regime forces pounded the Homs district of Khaldiyeh all morning," the Observatory said, adding two people were killed in Houla overnight.

A rebel commander in Homs told that his troops were fighting to reclaim the neighborhood of Baba Amro, which underwent a relentless month-long onslaught by regime forces in March. "For the first time in months, we fought hard at the entrances to Baba Amr and came very close to reclaiming the district," said Nasser Nahhar of the FSA. "We would have retaken Baba Amr were it not for the helicopters.

Heavy fighting took place in other parts of the city, leaving one rebel dead as well as a number of soldiers, according to the Observatory.

Eleven civilians were killed elsewhere in Homs province, while two civilians were killed in the Kurdish Mountain region near the Turkish border. In the eastern province of Deir Ezzor, another civilian was killed by a sniper, the Britain-based watchdog said.

Yesterday, 80 people were killed in violence across Syria, the watchdog said. The escalation in violence follows an assessment by UN peacekeeping chief Herve Ladsous that Syria was now in civil war, with regime forces having lost control of "large chunks of territory."