Syrian
President Bashar Assad's troops, backed by Lebanese
Hezbollah fighters,
regained control of the embattled strategic town of al-Qusayr where
fighting has raged with rebels for nearly three weeks, state TV and a
local government official said.
The capture of the town, which
lies close to the Lebanese border, solidifies some of the regime's
recent gains on the ground that have shifted the balance of power in
Assad's favor in the Syrian civil war.
Images broadcast Wednesday
in Syria by media embedded with the Syrian army in al-Qusayr showed a
deserted town, with heavily damaged buildings.
Military bulldozers were removing rubble and clearing roads as armored vehicles whizzed by.
The
Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said al-Qusayr came
under intense overnight shelling, forcing the rebel fighters, short of
ammunition, to withdraw.
State media said government forces
flushed rebels out on Tuesday of a key district on the northeastern edge
of Damascus from where opposition fighters had been trying to push into
the capital.
In recent weeks, Assad's forces also regained
control of a key highway linking Aleppo, Syria's largest city, with its
international airport after clearing rebels from villages along the way.
The
regime's capture of al-Qusayr comes as France and Britain made
back-to-back announcements Tuesday that the nerve gas sarin was used in
Syria's conflict.
This as a meeting in Geneva between Russian,
U.S. and U.N. officials failed to resolve questions about a proposed
Syria peace conference, including who would take part, the Interfax news
agency quoted Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Gennady Gatilov as
saying.
Positions:
Syria's army said on Wednesday that the capture of the
town of Qusayr from rebel fighters showed that President Bashar
al-Assad's forces would eventually regain control of the whole country.
In
turn, the leader of Syria's main opposition group vows the rebels will
continue to battle President Bashar Assad's troops after the fall of the
strategic town near the border with Lebanon.
George Sabra, the
acting head of the Western-backed Syrian National Coalition, said the
battle for Qusayr, a town in western Syrian, was just "one round" in a
larger fight to "liberate Syria."
He slammed Hezbollah's
"murderous" involvement in the Qusayr fight and warned the group's role
in the Syrian battle will deepen the Sunni-Shiite rift in the region.
For
its part, Russia accused unnamed states of using a "biased" U.N. human
rights report on Syria to condemn President Bashar al-Assad's government
and gloss over abuses by his foes, especially Islamist militants.
On
another note, a conference on ending the fighting in Syria may possibly
be held in July, international envoy for Syria Lakhdar Brahimi said
after preparatory talks with U.S. and Russian officials on Wednesday.
He
said the sole sticking point was that the two Syrian sides themselves
were not yet ready to commit to the conference. He will chair a second
round of preparatory talks on June 25.
AP/REUTERS
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