Syrian Army ambush leaves 40 rebels dead

DAMASCUS: Syrian government troops on Friday ambushed rebels near the capital, Damascus, killing at least 40 opposition fighters, state media reported. The ambush was part of the military’s offensive against rebel strongholds around President Bashar Assad’s seat of power.
Also Friday, Kurdish gunmen battled rebels in a northeastern Syrian town along the border with Iraq, leaving a number of casualties on both sides, activists said. Such battles have become increasingly common in Syria’s bloodletting, adding another complex layer to the civil war, now in its third year.
The ambush near Damascus came hours after Assad’s forces captured the town of Hatitat Al-Turkomen south of the city, securing a key highway that links the capital with the Damascus International Airport.
State-run SANA news agency said 40 rebels were killed in the ambush, which took place near the Otaiba area, and that a large arms cache was seized, including anti-tank rockets. The area is part of a region known as Eastern Ghouta, which was the scene of a horrific chemical weapons attack in August, when several hundred people, including many women and children, were killed.
An unidentified Syrian army officer in the area told state-run Al-Ikhbariya TV station that there were foreign fighters among the dead and that the ambush followed an intelligence tip.
The TV broadcast footage showing more than a dozen bodies of men lying on the ground in an open area near a small river, along with scattered automatic rifles and hand grenades. A scroll on the TV read: “Eastern Ghouta is a graveyard of terrorists.” The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an activist group that tracks Syria’s crisis, said at least 20 fighters were killed in the ambush but gave no further details.
In other violence, the Observatory reported that a car bomb blew up outside a mosque in the village of Wadi Barada, and that 40 people were either killed or wounded in the blast. State-run news agency SANA said the car blew up as people were rigging it with explosives.
On the Kurdish-jihadi battles, the Observatory said Kurdish gunmen made advances in the predominantly Kurdish province of Hassaekh. The Kurdish militiamen entered the town of Yaaroubiyeh on Friday, clashing with several jihadi groups, including Al-Qaeda-linked Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant and Nusra Front.
Meanwhile, Syrian helicopter gunships attacked several areas of the rebel-held northern town of Safira, southeast of the heavily contested city of Aleppo, the country’s largest. A military complex near the town is believed to include an underground facility for chemical weapons production and storage.
Separately, Friday, Norway turned down a US request to receive the bulk of Syria’s chemical weapons for destruction, saying it doesn’t have the capabilities to complete the task by the deadlines set by an international chemical watchdog.
Norwegian Foreign Minister Boerge Brende, said his country could not find a port that could receive the required amount of chemical agents and didn’t have the capacity to treat some of the waste products resulting from the destruction of the munitions.