An al-Qaeda offshoot led an offensive Monday against regime forces in northwest Syria, sparking clashes that left 19 pro-government fighters and 22 jihadists dead, a war monitor said.
“Jihadist factions led by Hurras al-Deen launched an assault on two villages in Sahl al-Ghab,” a region of the central province of Hama, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said. They briefly seized the villages of Al-Fatatra and Al-Manara, Observatory chief Rami Abdel Rahman said.
But regime forces took them back just hours later amid Russian air strikes and intense shelling, the Britain-based monitor said.