BEIRUT — Friday and, buoyed by the victory, intensified their offensive on two other bases in their most aggressive campaign yet to erode the air supremacy on which the regime of President Bashar Assad has increasingly relied in the past year.
The rebels control the ground in large parts of the north, but they have been unable to solidify their grip because they - and civilians in rebel-held regions - come under withering strikes from aircraft stationed at a number of military bases in the area.
The Taftanaz air base in Idlib province is the largest air base yet to be captured by the rebels. It is the biggest field in the north for helicopters the military uses for strikes on rebels and for delivering supplies to government troops still in the north to avoid the danger of rebel attacks on the roads.
Shortly after they captured the Taftanaz field, rebels in the neighboring province of Aleppo intensified their assault on the Mannagh air base and the international airport of the city of Aleppo, which includes a military base. Rebels have been trying to capture the two sites since last week, along with a third airfield known as Kweires.
The latest fighting came as international envoy Lakhdar Brahimi expressed little hope for a political solution anytime soon for Syria’s nearly 2-year-old civil war after meeting Friday with senior Russian and U.S. diplomats at the United Nations’ European headquarters.
Brahimi, who is the joint U.N.-Arab League envoy for Syria, met with Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov and U.S. Deputy Secretary of State William Burns. The talks were part of his attempts to find some traction for an international peace plan calling for creation of a new, provisional government in Damascus that has so far gone nowhere.
Brahimi spoke with Assad in late December about the plan during a visit to the Syrian capital. Days afterward, Assad went on state TV with a speech and a plan of his own, offering to oversee a national conciliation conference while rejecting any talks with the armed opposition and vowing to continue fighting them.
The speech was widely condemned, though Russia, one of Assad’s closest allies, said elements of it should be considered. Russia, along with China, has used its veto at the U.N. Security Council to shield its last Mideast ally from international sanctions.
“We are very, very deeply aware of the immense suffering of the Syrian people, which has gone on for far too long,” Brahimi told reporters after his talks Friday in Geneva. “And we all stressed the need for a speedy end to the bloodshed, to the destruction and all forms of violence in Syria.
“But if you are asking me whether a solution is around the corner, I’m not sure that is the case,” he said.
In Washington, State Department spokesman Victoria Nuland said Brahimi’s talks Friday produced “some progress” but that more work was needed. She said all parties support the idea of a transitional government that would be agreed to by the regime and Syrian opposition, and would have full executive powers.
“I’m obviously going to let the Russians speak for themselves, but it’s hard to imagine how you would have a transitional government with Assad still part of it,” Nuland told reporters.
More than 60,000 people have been killed since March 2011 in Syria’s conflict, which has turned into an outright civil war driving hundreds of thousands from their homes and across the borders into neighboring countries.
Neither side has been able to gain a decisive military edge. But the capture of Taftanaz showed the creeping progress of rebels in the pocket of northwest Syria where they have been trying to solidify their control.
The fall of the base is a sign of the regime’s fraying hold in the north. It also provides a strong boost for the arsenal of the rebels, who partially rely on weapons looted from the military.
It chips away at the regime’s air power in the north, but is far from eliminating it. There remain several other, smaller helicopter bases, and regime warplanes that also strike the area operate from bases farther south. The capture wouldn’t affect the military’s air power against rebels in other parts of the country.
“It is a moral blow but will not change the reality on the ground,” said Hisham Jaber, a retired Lebanese army general who heads the Beirut-based think tank Middle East Center for Studies and Public Relations. He noted the regime has more than a dozen military bases around the country.
The battle also showed the strength of Islamic militants in the rebel ranks. The assault on Taftanaz was carried out by fighters from Jabhat al-Nusra, an al-Qaida-affiliated group that includes many non-Syrian jihadists, and byother Syrian brigades with a similar hard-line Islamist ideology.
Fighters from Jabhat al-Nusra, which the U.S. has branded a terrorist organization, have been among the most effective in the rebel ranks.
They began their siege of the sprawling base in November and finally broke into it Wednesday evening. After fierce fighting lasting until dawn, they swept over the entire facility.
“As of now, the rebels are in full control of the air base,” said Idlib-based activist Mohammad Kanaan.
After sunset, troops bombarded Taftanaz with artillery from nearby areas, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based anti-Assad activist group that gathers information from operatives in Syria. Rebels have been forced to abandon previous bases they have captured because they are too exposed to regime strikes.
An activist who accompanied rebel fighters said the Taftanaz base was targeted because helicopters from there have frequently attacked civilians. “The helicopters of the regime used to take off from Taftanaz airport to bomb all the towns and cities in Idlib,” said the activist, who goes by the name Fadi Yaseen.
Approximately 1,000 rebel fighters attacked the base, where about 400 Syrian military personnel were posted, Yaseen said. He estimated that 100 Syrian troops and 20 rebels were killed during the fighting.
A video posted online Friday shows the bloodied bodies of several Syrian military personnel, whom the cameraman identifies as pilots. They appear to have been shot en masse in a shallow hole. “May Allah punish you for what you did,” a man says off camera.
In a reminder of how anti-government groups continue to use social media to spread the word about their progress in the conflict, one fighter or activist posted a live, 34-minute video stream on the site bambuser.com as he walked around the base Friday afternoon. At one point, the cameraman stopped and filmed approximately half a dozen dead Syrian troops slumped over in bloody uniforms.
“We called on them to defect for the past 10 days, but they refused,” the man says on the video. “They died for their refusal.”
Some of those who helped capture Taftanaz were members of the rebel Free Syrian Army, Yaseen said. But activists said the bulk of the attacking force was made up of fighters from Jabhat al-Nusra, along with Ahrar al-Sham and Talia al-Islamiya, two other religious extremist groups.
A video posted online Friday shows a fighter gleefully raiding a weapons storage facility while a group of fellow fighters bow down and pray nearby. Another video shows a couple of fighters standing on a helicopter at the base and chanting, “We want an Islamic state.”
Some observers have expressed concern that the success of the religious extremists will lead to more sectarian violence against members of Assad’s minority Alawitesect. Under Assad’s authoritarian rule, Syria’s government has been steadfastly secular. Many of the Islamists fighting against the government view anyone who does not follow their version of hard-line Sunni Islam as an infidel.
Also Friday, a car bomb killed one person in Damascus, activists and state media said. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the dead man was a police general, while state-run news agency SANA said he was a civilian.
Rebels said Friday that a senior rebel commander was gunned down this week by rival fighters in northern Syria.
Thaer al-Waqqas, a northern commander with the al-Farouq Brigades, was shot dead at a rebel-held position in the town of Sarmada, near the Turkish border Wednesday. A rebel, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the slaying, said al-Waqqas had been wanted by Jabhat al-Nusra for suspected involvement in the September killing of Sheikh Firas al-Absi, a member of the group.
Al-Farouk Brigades, in a posting on its website, vowed to avenge the killing.
Information for this article was contributed by Bassem Mroue of The Associated Press and by Babak Dehghanpisheh, Suzan Haidamous and Ahmed Ramadan of The Washington Post.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 01/12/2013