By Thousands of people have fled the Syrian city of Homs as rebel fighters pushed further south with their rapid assault on government forces, a leading monitoring group said.
If the strategically important municipality were to fall, it would leave three of the country’s five largest cities in the hands of the forces led by the militant group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) and no major cities between rebel forces and the Syrian capital of Damascus.
In less than two weeks they have already captured the city of Aleppo in the north, as well as the central city of Hama — where government forces were forced out Thursday.
“Our forces continue to advance towards the city of Homs at a steady pace, thanks to God, after the arrival of convoys carrying hundreds of displaced people from Homs to deter Assad’s aggression against their city,” said Hassan Abdul-Ghani, senior commander of the HTS-led forces on Friday in a post on X.
While Hama was a more symbolic victory for the HTS-led insurgents, taking Homs would send a more practical message, said Neil Quilliam, an associate fellow with the MENA Programme at Chatham House, a London-based think tank.
Homs “is a stepping stone to Damascus and what comes next,” he told NBC News on Friday. “It would be passing through a threshold that suggests to the [Syrian] forces and all Syrians that HTS and those fighting forces with it are about to bear down on the capital and sweep away the regime.”
With his forces nearing, thousands of people had fled towards western coastal regions, a stronghold of the government where fighting has remained less fierce than in other parts of the country, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said Friday.
Various reports from around the country also suggested that the fall of Aleppo and Hama, as well other cities such as Idlib and numerous rural settlements, has significantly strained Assad’s forces as fighting between government troops and various rebel groups raged around the country.
Pro-Assad soldiers were also battling Kurdish forces who seized government positions in eastern Syria near the cities of Raqqa and Deir Ez-Zour, the Observatory said.
