From a Turkish journalist:
2 colonels, 1 lt. colonel, 1 major, 1 captain, 2 lieutenants, 2 sergeants, 42 soldiers are among 1,975 Syrians who fled to Turkey today (Friday). That makes 7 officers, 2 noncoms and 42 soldiers (over 50 in all).
From Enduring America:
The FSA appears to have won a major victory in Kafranbel, a key town in Idlib province (map, see update 1522). It indicates a major victory for the insurgents.
According to the report, the FSA destroyed 6 tanks and 5 armored BMPs. The FSA reportedly captured 10 BMPs, 3 tanks, and other equipment. The biggest claim, and the hardest to confirm, is the report that 300 Assad soldiers have been killed, but the regime only killed 112 people, most of whom were civilians, with an additional 450 people injured in the fight.
None of that is confirmed, however the one thing that is clear is that the amount of armor and tanks destroyed seems accurate, based on reports that we’ve seen. And despite the heavy death toll to civilians and insurgents, the Free Syrian Army, and not the Syrian regime, still controls the town.
From the Guardian’s Jonathan Steel, who described his visit to the Tishreen military hospital in Damascus.
The director of the hospital, who is a general, told me the number of patients they are getting, wounded soldiers, is increasing, ranging between 20 and 50 a day …the highest they’ve had since this whole conflict started.
I spoke to some wounded police who were in a minibus coming to work on Thursday morning. They were actually in civilian clothes they said, because no one dares to come in uniform. They suddenly ran into an unexpected checkpoint run by the rebels, about 35 miles north of Damascus, and the wounded soldier told me the rebels just opened fire without warning and six people in the minibus were killed …
There were two young soldiers as well, conscripts, in a separate ward, injured in another incident even nearer to Damascus just in the north, which is a place called al-Tal. They were just running an army post beside the road and came under fire by snipers …
These were just two incidents on Thursday morning …they are typical of the kind of things that are happening. The rebels are attacking police posts and army posts, particularly on the main road or close to the main roads as the government tries to send in reinforcements for the defence of Aleppo and other places.
From Enduring America (condensed here)
Not only do rebels seem to have retaken Saleh-al-dine, where many Assad soldiers were ambushed and killed, but t
here were unconfirmed reports also that regime soldiers have begun to make a quick withdrawal from the adjacent Hamdania neighborhood, where troops and tanks have been stationed for weeks, firing on Salahuddin.
Hamdania is the location of the artillery academy (map), and the two districts are very close to a major artillery base (map), locations used to launch the initial attack into Aleppo.
This is unconfirmed news, but if true, this is a significant military blow to the Assad regime. This is the heart of the Assad military complex in Aleppo. If Assad is losing these districts, it means that the FSA has expanded its control beyond where it was before yesterday’s Assad advance.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the city, Syrian State media reports that insurgents have launched an attack against the international airport (map). While the Syrian media says that the attack was defeated, it gives credence to reports that the FSA has been launching attacks on the airport which has also been used to launch helicopters and fighter jets used against the city.
OBSERVATION: When you add up the defections into Turkey and the casualties described in these reports alone and then throw in additional defections within the country or to Iraq or Jordan, just imagine the regime’s losses. Don’t forget the reports above included only one of Assad’s military hospitals. For each soldier killed, how many were injured severally enough to be knocked out of combat?
