Clashes intensified on Friday between the Syrian regime troops and the al-Nusra Front fighters nearby the Syrian region of Rahjan which is located in the eastern part of Hama after rebels controlled the lands that surround the home of Syrian Minister of Defense Fahed al-Freij.
This as the al-Nusra Front announced that it seized a large quantity of weapons and ammunition from the locality.
Earlier, a Kuwaiti suicide bomber identified as Abu Baker blew himself up in the region of Rahjan, prompting the destruction of a wall the Syrian regime troops were using as shelter.
On Thursday, Islamic militants using weapons they recently seized in neighboring Iraq intensified an offensive against Kurdish areas in northern
Syria as they fight to expand the territory under their control, activists said.
The clashes came as a Syrian watchdog group said the death toll in Syria's three-year conflict has climbed to 171,000, reflecting the relentless bloodletting in a civil war that appears no closer to being resolved.
Nearly half of the dead were civilians, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said. Members of the Islamic State group and Kurdish fighters have been fighting each other for a year, but the Kurds were usually the instigators until earlier this month when the balance of power appears to have tipped in favor of the Sunni extremists because of the large amounts of weapons they brought from Iraq into Syria.
Islamic State fighters captured several Kurdish villages and killed dozens of fighters in the area this week, according to activists. The clashes come after the Islamic State group seized territories straddling Syria and neighboring Iraq and declared a self-styled Islamic caliphate.
Most of the land was seized in June during a push across Iraq. They captured large amounts of weapons left behind by Iraqi troops including U.S.-made armored personnel carriers, Humvees and artillery.
Kurdish official Nawaf Khalil said members of the Islamic State group are trying to capture an area near the Turkish border that would link it with their positions in eastern Syria.
He and other activists said the fighting is concentrated in the region of Kobani, also known as Ayn Arab. Mustafa Osso, a Turkey-based Kurdish activist who has wide contacts in northern Syria, says the aim of the offensive is to take the entire Kobani area.
Osso says those standing against the Islamic State group are mostly members of the People's Protection Units, the armed wing of the Kurdish Democratic Union Party.
Both Khalil and the Observatory said some of the dead Kurdish fighters were charred without suffering any bullets or shrapnel wounds. The Observatory said the burned bodies "have made doctors suspicious about the type of weapons used."
On Wednesday, Islamic State group captured three villages near Kobani and pressed forward toward the border town. Kurds are the largest ethnic minority in Syria, making up more than 10 percent of the country's prewar population of 23 million.
They are centered in the impoverished northeastern province of Hassakeh, wedged between the borders of Turkey and Iraq.
Also Thursday, the UN Refugee Agency announced that it began an airlift operation to deliver emergency relief items from Damascus to 50,000 people in Hassakeh.
Syria's conflict that began in March 2011 has led to the displacement of nearly a third of its prewar population of 23 million.
LBCI/AP