The ISIS offensive against the northeastern Syrian city of Hasakeh, the capital of Syria’s Kurdish territory, is continuing apace, with ISIS forces drawing ever closer to the city’s gates in fierce battles, and irrespective of heavy airstrikes from the Syrian military.
Hasakeh is the first major example of the Assad government working alongside Kurdish militias in trying to defend territory from ISIS. Barrel bombs are reportedly being dropped on the ISIS troops, who have been using suicide attacks to wear down the defenders.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights put today’s death toll at 130, including 59 ISIS fighters and 71 government loyalists. 11 suicide car bombings were reported over the course of that advance, and ISIS seized parts of the outskirts of the city.
Hasakeh is the capital of its own province, and part of the nation’s main oil producing region. All electricity and communications in the city have been cut off for the last few days, and many civilians have fled from the city to the surrounding area.
If Hasakeh falls, the surrounding area may not matter much, as this would mean ISIS wrapping up the last of eastern Syria. They control over 50% of the nation, and the entire Iraq-Syria border, so the takeover of this region would allow them to focus more power on their western front.
The pattern I see here is clear: why keep mentioning battle casualties, even more so, when given by a totally discredited opposition guy in England, the pompously named 'sohr'??
How can he possibly know how many casualties were sustained by ISIS and how many on the syrian government side? Of course he cannot.
What 'sohr' aims at is propaganda, inflating losses on the government side and downplaying those of the various waahabi groups.
Almost everytime casualties are given by sohr, an impossible task anyhow, the government supposedly suffers greater losses than the islamic militants. How about that!
The reality is the opposite of that; the militants generally – but not always – suffer greater casualties.
Casualty counts have always had a great propagandisc use, see for instance the ridiculously inflated numbers still offered(70 years after the war) by american and british 'historians' re German losses in Normandy.
Re Al-Hasakah… What progress exactly? It may well be that this relatively isolated provincial capital eventually falls, but so far ISISs attacks have been all beaten back. IS took the central prison and the power plant on Friday morning and lost all that in a counter-attack later. Their attempts at infiltration of the Abdel-‘Aziz Mountains located west of Al-Hasakah were also defeated.
To say that ISIS controls more than half of Syria is not only false but fails to recognize they only control one large population center, Raqqah.
Interesting also that the syrian government wins or those of its allies are generally under-reported around here. There is an important campaign ongoing against both isis and the nusra front in the strategic Qalamoun mountains on the syrian/lebanese border. Hezbollah and Syrian forces have been racking up victory after victory almost everyday.
Overall, i find the reporting re Syria to be very poor, most of it is the same disinfo one can easily get from msm.