Syrian army launches counteroffensive

BEIRUT, Dec 04 (AFP): Syrian government forces launched a counterattack against Islamist-led rebels around the key city of Hama on Wednesday after suffering a string of staggering losses, a war monitor said.

Hama is strategically located in central Syria and for the army, it is key to safeguarding the capital and seat of power Damascus.

The fighting around Hama follows a lightning offensive by the Islamist-led rebels who in a matter of days seized swathes of territory from President Bashar al-Assad's control.

Key in the rebels' successes since the start of the offensive last week has been the takeover of Aleppo, Syria's second city, which in more than a decade of war had never fallen from government hands.

In Aleppo, a medical student told AFP that staff at the hospital where he worked were "largely absent, with departments working at 50 percent capacity".

"We try to tend to emergency cases that come to the hospital, using medical supplies sparingly," he said on condition of anonymity.

While the advancing rebels found little resistance earlier in their offensive, the fighting around Hama has been especially fierce.

The city was the scene of a massacre by the army under Assad's father in the 1980s targeting people accused of loyalty to the banned Muslim Brotherhood.

Decades on, the scars of the massacre that sent thousands of Syrians into exile have yet to heal, and Hama was the site of some of the biggest protests early on in the pro-democracy revolt that erupted in 2011 and sparked the civil war.

By Tuesday, rebel forces had reached the gates of Hama city, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitor, as the fighting sparked a wave of displacement.

AFP images showed people fleeing the town of Suran, between Aleppo and Hama, many of them carrying whatever they could take aboard their vehicles.

According to the Britain-based Observatory, "regime forces launched a counterattack" in Hama province on Wednesday with air support on the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) rebels and allied factions.

Government forces pushed HTS away from the provincial capital by about 10 kilometres (six miles), the Observatory said, reporting fierce battles as rebels failed in their bid to capture an area near the city.

Syrian state news agency SANA also reported the battle around Hama, saying the army was conducting operations against "terrorist organisations" in the north of the province.