Syrian troops seize contested Damascus suburb

As reported in 'The Japan News' :

Syrian troops seize contested Damascus suburb 7:39 pm, August 15, 2014 The Associated Press BEIRUT (AP)—Syrian government troops captured a fiercely contested suburb of the capital Thursday after five months of heavy fighting, flushing rebels from their last hideouts and quickly moving to crush pockets of resistance in the surrounding countryside, activists and state media said. The fall of Mleiha, located some 10 kilometers southeast of downtown Damascus, marks the latest setback for rebels around the capital. Over the past year, the opposition has watched as one stronghold after another has either slipped into government hands or been forced to strike lopsided truces. The military’s campaign around Damascus has succeeded in pushing the rebels farther from the heart of the city, while also strengthening President Bashar Assad’s once shaky hold on the capital. Those gains, coupled with significant victories elsewhere in Syria in recent months, have swung the momentum in Syria’s 3½-year-old conflict firmly in the government’s favor. In the country’s north and east, however, government forces have fallen back in the face of an advance by the extremist Islamic State group, which has seized several military bases and outposts and killed hundreds of soldiers and pro-government fighters. The group, which has declared a self-styled caliphate in areas straddling the Iraq-Syria border, continued to advance in the northern Aleppo province Thursday after seizing a string of towns and villages a day earlier, activists said. Mainstream rebels in the divided city of Aleppo, already squeezed by President Bashar Assad’s forces, now fear the advancing militants. The city, once Syria’s commercial capital, is carved up between rebel and government-held districts and has seen heavy fighting since rebels seized parts of it in 2012. Syria’s Western-backed opposition group, the Syrian National Coalition, issued an appeal for immediate U.S. military assistance to stop what it said was a two-front attack by Islamic State fighters and Assad’s forces.