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On March 30, al-Qeada-affiliated Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the de-facto ruler of the northwestern Syrian region of Greater Idlib, announced that its militants had carried out yet another attack against the Syrian Arab Army (SAA).
The attack targeted military positions located in the outskirts of the town of Basratun in the western countryside of Aleppo.
Syrian pro-government news sources said that the SAA repelled the attack on the town and targeted HTS’s miliants with artillery.
Meanwhile, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported heavy clashes near Basraturn. According to the London-based monitoring group, both the SAA and HTS sustained casualties in the clashes.
This was HTS’s third attack against the SAA in a week. On March 23, ten militants and a field commander of the terrorist group were killed by the SAA during a failed attack on the 46th Regiment base in the western Aleppo countryside. Later on March 25, eight more militants were killed during an attack on the government-held town of Ruweiha in the southern countryside of Idlib.
HTS escalated its attacks against the SAA in the last few months in an apparent attempt to sabotage Russian efforts to restore ties between Ankara, who maintains a large force in Greater Idlib, and Damascus. The group fears that Ankra would withdraw its force from Greater Idlib to facilitate the normalization process with Damascus.
While the recent attacks destabilized the situation in Greater Idlib, they failed to hinder the normalization process. The deputy foreign ministers of Turkey and Syria are set to hold a meeting with their Russian and Iranian counterparts in Moscow next week.
