DAMASCUS: Turkey scrambled a fighter jet yesterday after a Syrian helicopter shelled the Syrian town of Azmarin near their common border, an official told AFP.

“The fighter jet took off from Diyarbakir base in the southeast after Assad’s forces sent a helicopter to shell Azmarin which was seized by Syrian fighters,” the official said on condition of anonymity.

Meanwhile, fighters have gone on the offensive killing more than 100 soldiers in two days, a watchdog said yesterday.

Fourteen soldiers died in an attack on an army post in the southern province of Daraa, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said, a day after the army suffered 92 losses, the highest daily total for the military of the 19-month conflict.

With an average of 20 deaths per day, the army has lost about 10,000 soldiers, with at least an equal number wounded, in the conflict, a military hospital official told AFP. In August, the same source reported more than 8,000 deaths.

As fighting raged on the ground, including in the northern provinces of Idlib and Aleppo, a war of words between Syria and Turkey grew angrier after Ankara said it had found military supplies on a passenger plane it intercepted en route between Moscow and Damascus.

Turkey’s allies have warned of the risks embedded in the conflict between the neighbors, which have exchanged fire over their border in recent days, amid fears that the Syrian civil war could set off a regional conflagration.

Amid the growing alarm, German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle said yesterday he has hastily scheduled a visit to NATO partner Turkey. Westerwelle, who is on a trip to China, said in a statement he would hold talks Saturday with his Turkish counterpart Ahmet Davutoglu in Istanbul on “the situation in Syria and on the Turkish-Syrian border.”

“The Syria situation has escalated. That fills us with the greatest concern,” he said. “It is important that no one pours oil on the fire. We are counting on moderation and de-escalation.”

The Britain-based Observatory said that Thursday had marked one of the deadliest days of fighting since an anti-regime revolt erupted in March last year, with at least 240 people killed across the country, including the 92 soldiers, 67 fighters and 81 civilians. Of the soldiers killed on Thursday, 36 died in fighting in Idlib province, where many of the fiercest clashes have taken place over the past three months, it said.

In violence yesterday, regime war planes attacked two buildings in the Idlib town of Maaret Al-Numan, where intense fighting has raged since fighters overran it on Tuesday after a fierce 48-hour gun battle, the watchdog said. An AFP reporter said that the fighters, by gaining control of a stretch of highway near Maaret Al-Numan, were on Thursday able to cut off the route linking Damascus to Aleppo, choking the flow of troops to battlefields in the north.

Fighters’ spokesman Firaz Abdel Hadi said almost 300 people had been killed in three days in Maaret Al-Numan.

In Aleppo province, fighters attacked yesterday a large air force post on the highway connecting Aleppo to Raqa province, further to the east, near to the Kweris military airport, according to the Observatory.

“The fighters attacked the air force battalion after midnight and the clashes went on until dawn, but the fighters definitely did not gain control of the post,” Observatory director Rami Abdel Rahman told AFP by phone.