Tabnak – More than six years after the start of the civil war in Syria, eastern parts of the country have become a new zone for the concentration of anti-ISIS military operations. Meanwhile, it seems that the US-backed militants are trying to limit the advances of the Syrian army in the east.
According to Reuters, US-backed Syrian militias will not let government forces cross the Euphrates River in their bid to recover eastern Syria, their commander said on Friday, but Russia said army units had already done so near the city of Dayr al-Zawr.
Syrian government forces supported by Russian air strikes and popular units on the one hand, and a US-backed alliance of Kurdish and Arab fighters (Syrian Democratic Forces or SDF), are converging on ISIS terrorist group in separate offensives around Dayr al-Zawr.
The government side has advanced into the city from the west. Last week, they broke an ISIS siege of the provincial capital, which sits on the western bank of the river.
The Syrian army, which is receiving advisory military help from Iran and Russia and aerial cover from the Russian air force, has said any force seeking to fight terrorism in Syria has to coordinate with it. The US-backed SDF is not.
In the same vein, a top aide to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad said on Friday that Syrian government troops and allied forces would fight any force, including the US-backed militants, in their push to fully liberate the Arab country.
Dayr al-Zawr is an important battleground. ISIS has mobilized its forces and moved heavy weaponry to the province to make it its main staging area in the face of increasing defeats elsewhere in the country.
The liberation of a stretch of land in Dayr-al-Zawr that borders Iraq would be particularly important because it would stop the terrorists’ cross-border transit between Syria and Iraq.
The Russian- and US-backed campaigns against Islamic State in Syria have so far mostly stayed out of each other’s way as the sides seek to avoid conflict, with the Euphrates often acting as a dividing line between the sides. Talks have been underway to extend a formal demarcation line that has separated the campaigns, officials have said.
But this time, as SDF commander has threatened that if his forces come under fire on the eastern bank of the Euphrates, they would return the fire. "We have notified the regime and Russia that we are coming to the Euphrates riverbank, and they can see our forces advancing,” Press TV quotes the commander as saying.
This is while, Last Saturday, Ahmad al-Ahmad, who heads the armed Syrian opposition’s Syria Press center, said that the SDF did not have the manpower to control Dayr al-Zawr. The army and its allies have already recaptured Dayr al-Zawr’s airbase, power station, and the Teym oilfield near the city.
