DAMASCUS, Syria
(AP) -- Al-Qaida-linked gunmen in northern Syria captured a town near
the Turkish border after heavy clashes with a rebel group in the area,
activists said Thursday.
It was the latest
development in what has been a relatively new component in the Syrian
conflict - stepped-up infighting between extremists with ties to
al-Qaida and Western-backed opposition groups.
The
U.S. and its European and Gulf allies are increasingly concerned about
the rising prominence of Islamists among the rebels, who have been
playing a major role in the battles against President Bashar Assad's
forces.
Elsewhere in Syria, a roadside bomb
struck a bus in the central province of Homs Thursday, killing 19
people, a local government official said. The explosion in the village
of Jbourin also wounded four people, according to the official from the
governor's office who spoke on condition of anonymity in line with
regulations.
The village is predominantly
Alawite, an offshoot of Shiite Islam and a minority sect to which Assad
belongs, but it also has Christians and Sunni Muslims.
It
was not immediately clear why the bus was targeted but Syria's civil
war, which has left more than 100,000 dead since the crisis erupted in
March 2011, has taken increasingly sectarian overtones. Most of the
rebels trying to overthrow Assad belong to the majority Sunni sect.
The
fighting in the north prompted Turkey to close the nearby border
crossing of Bab al-Salameh, a Turkish foreign ministry official said,
speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk
to the media.
The Britain-based Syrian
Observatory for Human Rights, an activist group that monitors the
conflict, said members of the al-Qaida offshoot known as the Islamic
State in Iraq and the Levant stormed the town of Azaz in the northern
Aleppo province on Wednesday evening, forcing opposition fighters from
the Western backed bloc to pull out.
There has
also been infighting among rebel groups in the eastern province of Deir
el-Zour, which borders Iraq, and in the north where al-Qaida fighters
from the ISIL and their allies in the Nusra Front have been battling
Kurdish anti-government rebels for months. The infighting has left
hundreds dead.
The Azaz clashes broke out
earlier Wednesday, when ISIL fighters tried to detain a German doctor
they accused of taking pictures of their positions on behalf of the
rival rebels, said Rami Abdul-Rahman, who heads the Observatory. The
doctor, who was a volunteer in the region, escaped but the two rebel
factions started fighting.
Amateur videos
showed dozens of gunmen with heavy machine guns mounted on pickup trucks
gathering at the nearby border crossing with Turkey. The videos
appeared genuine and corresponded to other Associated Press reporting on
the events depicted.
Abdul-Rahman said three
opposition fighters and two jihadis were killed in the fighting. On
Thursday, mediation was under way to get the jihadis to leave Azaz, he
said.
Loay al-Mikdad, a spokesman for the
Western-backed rebels of the Free Syrian Army, said the Azaz clashes
were a "provocation" by the al-Qaida-linked fighters.
"They
want to occupy the area ... What they are doing is unjustified, it
serves the (Assad) regime," Mekdad said by telephone from Turkey.
In
July, ISIL fighters killed two FSA commanders. The deaths enraged the
FSA leadership, which has since demanded that the killers be handed over
to stand trial.
The rise of jihadi fighters in Syria has been a worrying development.
According
to Charles Lister, an analyst with HIS Jane's Terrorism and Insurgency
Centre in Britain, al-Qaida-linked fighters make up between 10,000 and
12,000 of the insurgency's estimated 100,000-force but wield far more
influence because of their better discipline and battle experience.
Jihadis
"represent a comparatively small minority of the total insurgent force,
but as a result of superior finances, organizational capacity, and
individual fighter subservience to tight command and control structures,
they have been able to exert far more of an impact on the conflict than
some larger and more moderate insurgent forces," Lister wrote in a
statement Wednesday.
Also Thursday, the
international aid agency Oxfam issued an appeal, saying many donor
countries are failing to provide their share of the urgently-needed
funding for the humanitarian response to Syria crisis. Oxfam said
donors, including France, Qatar, United Arab Emirates and Russia, should
prioritize funding the U.N.'s $5 billion appeals.
Oxfam's
report came ahead of next week's donors meeting in New York. The donor
countries have been influential in shaping the international response to
the conflict, but should also bear their fair share of the burden of
humanitarian aid, the agency said.
"Too many
donor countries are not delivering the level of funds that is expected
of them," said Colette Fearon, head of Oxfam's Syria program. "While
economic times are tough, we are facing the largest man-made
humanitarian disaster in two decades and we have to seriously address
it."
"The scale of this crisis is
unprecedented and some countries must start to show their concerns to
the crisis in Syria by putting their hands in their pockets," Fearon
said.
The fighting in Syria has forced 7
million people to flee their homes. Five million Syrians have been
displaced inside the country and more than 2 million have sought refuge
in the neighboring countries of Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey and Iraq,
according to the U.N.
---
Mroue
reported from Beirut. Associated Press writers Desmond Butler in
Istanbul and Lori Hinnant in Paris contributed to this report.
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