'They cut off his head and sent a video to his brother': Assad general reveals the scale of torture on Syria's front line with jihadist enemies

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UK Independent:

Above us, white clouds graze the top of Tel Moussa, 9,400 feet of red rock above foothills of granite and valleys of innocent cherry orchards. Colonel Median of the Syrian Army’s 3rd Armoured Division stands on the dry, cold earth below, sun-shades above his stubble beard; he does not know the identity of the ancient Moussa who blessed this mountain with his name, but he knows how to curse him. “If I could catch him, I would hang him because he is the source of torture for me and many of my men.”

 

Across the gaunt peaks and caves of the Qalamoun range east of the Lebanese border, a kind of victory has been celebrated by the Syrian army after the sudden collapse of Palmyra to the “Islamic State”, a loss which – as they both admit freely — deeply shocked Median and his senior officer, General Ghassan. Months of fighting west of the town of Yabroud have freed a 25-mile front from the Nusra Islamists right up to the Lebanese frontier, and Ghassan’s 130-mm artillery are now dug in on the Syrian side of the border, scarcely 12 miles from the Lebanese city of Baalbek.

 

 

It has been a personal war for these soldiers: infantrymen along with paratroopers from the Syrian Republican Guard and the locally-raised “National Defence” militias – whose original creator was General Ghassan himself – and the hundreds of Lebanese Hezbollah fighters who also fought and died to the north of them on this same bleak mountain range. In one small village, as-Sarkha, Colonel Median lost 25 men, another ten climbing the slopes of Tel Moussa, two cut down by mortar fragments, three to mine explosions and five to sniper fire, and he claims — with a flip of the hand to take account of the obvious exaggerations of war – that an “estimated” 300 Nusra men were killed in the Syrian artillery, Mig fighter and helicopter ground attack rockets which took back this land.

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Fears for Aleppo as Isil seizes nearby Turkey border villages

 

Islamic State jihadists in Syria have advanced on towns and villages close to the Turkish border, laying siege to one of the last supply routes into the city of Aleppo.

In a lightening strike the jihadists have captured up to 25 villages in Aleppo province and closed in on the border town of Azaz, one of the last hubs for aid agencies providing help to tens of thousands of civilians trapped in war-riven Aleppo.

 

"It's a horror of death and bombing," said one aid worker in the area, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of attacks from Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil).

 

"Today Azaz is being shelled. Humanitarian agencies were providing food and hygiene kits to people in Aleppo. But two nights ago, when the campaign began, they had to take what they could form the warehouses and escape."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/syria/11643072/Fears-for-Aleppo-as-Isil-seizes-nearby-Turkey-border-villages.html