Regime Takes Oil Field Back from ISIS
AFP reports that on Saturday, Syrian government troops recaptured the giant Shaar gas field in Homs province – one of Syria’s largest – from the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, just one week after the jihadists seized it in what was reportedly the bloodiest 48-hour period of the conflict. The militants killed nearly 300 troops loyal to Assad in the battle for the oil facility, with some executed after being captured.
“Since this morning, there has been fighting around the Al-Shaar field between regime forces and the IS. The army has succeeded in ejecting the jihadists, and it now controls the site and surrounding hills,” the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an opposition-backed monitoring group, told the wire.
New U.S. Help Arrives for Syrian Rebels as Government, Extremists Gain
Liz Sly of the Washington Post reports that a U.S.-backed effort to arm the moderate opposition “is finally ramping up along the Turkey-Syria border, but it may come too late to save the rebels from defeats on two fronts, by President Bashar al-Assad’s government and by the extremists seeking to carve out an Islamic state.”
Sly writes that the U.S. and its allies, spurred by concerns that radicals will continue their march across Iraq and Syria, “have begun accelerating the supply of arms and ammunition to a small number of vetted rebel groups in northern Syria. Yet even as the fresh support arrives, challenges are mounting for the embattled moderates, who have been pushed out of eastern Syria by extremists, are being encircled in Aleppo by the government and are seeing their ranks eroded by defeats, desertions and infighting.”
Video Shows Smiling American Bomber in Syria
The AP reports that al-Qaida-linked Jabhat al-Nusra has released video of the first American to carry out a suicide attack in Syria, “showing him smiling and saying he looked forward to going to heaven.”
The new video was released late Friday and shows Moner Mohammad Abu-Salha, 22, with other fighters before the May 25 attack targeting several army positions in Idlib province. Two of the other three attackers were from foreign countries, including one from the Maldives.
“Abu-Salha appears smiling in the video and speaks in broken Arabic,” the wire writes. He says, “I want to rest in the afterlife, in heaven. There is nothing here and the heart is not resting. Heaven is better. When people die they either go to heaven or hell. There is happiness beyond explanation.”
Meanwhile, the Guardian profiles the first British suicide bomber in Syria. Last June, when the conflict was all over the UK press, Waheed told his family he was leaving his job to go on an aid convoy to Syria.
“We tried to talk him out of it,” his brother tells the paper. “His wife did, too. We said, you didn’t go to help before, in Afghanistan or Bosnia, why are you going now? He said Assad was not letting aid get in and people were being bombed, families torn apart. He said he had to go.”
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