Al Qaeda in Syria leaves area where Turkey seeks buffer

BEIRUT — Al Qaeda-linked Al Nusra Front says it has quit frontline positions against the Daesh terror group north of Aleppo and ceded them to other rebels, leaving an area of northern Syria where Turkey wants to set up a buffer zone.

An Al Nusra Front statement dated Sunday criticised a Turkish-US plan to drive Daesh from the Syrian-Turkish border area, saying the aim was to serve "Turkey's national security" rather than the fight against President Bashar Assad.

The United States and Turkey last month announced their intention to drive Daesh from a strip of territory in northern Syria near the Turkish border in a campaign that would provide air cover for Syrian rebels in the area.

Though Al Nusra is an enemy of Daesh, its foothold in northern Syria has been a problem for the US-led campaign against the ultra-hardline group. Late last month, Al Nusra attacked Syrian rebels trained as part of the US-led campaign against Daesh, calling them agents of US interests.

Al Nusra said Turkey was acting to prevent the formation of a Kurdish state in northern Syria, and the Turkish government and the US-led alliance against Daesh were seeking to direct the battle according to their priorities.

“Facing this current scene, our only option was to withdraw and leave our frontline positions [with Daesh] in the northern Aleppo countryside for any fighting faction in these areas to take over,” Al Nusra Front said.

Syrian rebels taking part in the plan as ground forces were not doing so voluntarily, it added.

Al Nusra Front said it would maintain frontlines with Daesh in other areas including Hama province and the Qalamoun mountain range at the border with Lebanon.

The planned buffer would prevent a powerful Syrian Kurdish militia, the YPG, from further expanding a zone of control that already stretches some 400km along the Syrian-Turkish border. The YPG has seized wide areas of territory from Daesh this year, backed by US-led air strikes.

Insurgent sources said Al Nusra had handed over two villages north of Aleppo to an alliance of rebel groups operating in the area known as Jabhat Al Shamiya, or the Levant Front.

Al Nusra Front is one of the most powerful insurgent groups fighting in the four-year-long Syrian war that has estimated to have killed a quarter-of-a-million people and largely reduced Assad’s control to the cities of western Syria.

Al Nusra has been a major force behind insurgent advances in northwestern Syria this year. Turkish support for the rebels has been crucial throughout the conflict. Assad last month said Turkey had intervened directly to assist insurgents who advanced in the northwest earlier this year.

Insurgent groups including Al Nusra Front escalated an attack on some of the last government-controlled areas in the northwestern province of Idlib on Monday.

Opposition-affiliated media broadcast images of a large explosion targeting government forces in the village of Al Foua.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a UK-based group that tracks the war using sources on the ground, reported heavy fighting between rebels including Al Nusra Front, and pro-government forces it said were led by Lebanon’s Hizbollah, an Iranian-backed Shiite group fighting alongside the Syrian army.

State TV said pro-government forces “continued their resistance” to the attack on Al Foua and nearby Kefraya, which both have Shiite populations.

Insurgents are also pressing a separate offensive in Sahl Al Ghab, an agricultural plain of vital strategic importance to Assad because of its proximity to the city of Hama and the coastal mountains that are home to his Alawite sect.

Rami Abdulrahman, who runs the observatory, said insurgents now controlled around half of Sahl Al Ghab.