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The bombing has thwarted the offensive launched by militants on the town of Tel Rifat, RIA Novosti has reported
Syria has launched an airstrike targeting a motorized column of terrorists in the country’s northwestern Aleppo Province, RIA Novosti has reported, citing local security sources. The news agency has published aerial footage showing the raid.
The strike was ordered in response to a surprise counteroffensive launched by the militants against Syrian troops on Wednesday. Hayat Tahrir-al-Sham (HTS), a terrorist group formerly known as Jabhat al-Nusra and affiliated with Al Qaeda, attacked government-controlled territory in the north of the country on Wednesday alongside a collection of allied militias, breaking a fragile truce brokered by Russia and Türkiye in 2020.
A short black-and-white clip shows a column of vehicles moving along a road through open terrain. The group is then engulfed in a series of powerful explosions, with fire and smoke rising high into the air. It is unclear what types of heavy equipment the jihadists had in their possession as the vehicles are barely distinguishable in the video.
A Syrian security source told RIA that the column consisted of heavy armor the terrorists had planned to use in an offensive on the town of Tel Rifat, located some 35 kilometers to the north of the provincial capital Aleppo.
Earlier, RIA published another video showing a strike against various facilities reportedly occupied by the jihadists. The attacks were aimed and preventing the terrorists from staging another offensive on Aleppo from the province of Idlib, which was left outside the control of Damascus following the Syrian conflict.
Russian aircraft also launched a series of attacks against the terrorists following the surprise offensive. More than 400 jihadists were killed in the airstrikes, the Russian military said on Friday.
The Syrian Arab Army also claimed that the strikes had inflicted devastating losses on the extremists.
HTS and allied groups have claimed to have seized some 400 square kilometers of territory, reaching the outskirts of the city of Aleppo on Thursday, Turkish news agency Anadolu reported on Friday. They also claim to have captured some heavy weaponry and military hardware from the Syrian Army. Dozens of civilians have been killed in the terrorist assault since Wednesday, according to the UN.
READ MORE: Russian jets strike jihadists near Aleppo and Idlib in Syria – military
Moscow has called the developments “an attack on Syria’s sovereignty in the region” and urged Damascus to restore “order there as soon as possible.” Iran branded the terrorist offensive “an American-Zionist” plot, suggesting that Washington and West Jerusalem were using HTS as proxies to strike a blow against Assad’s government, which supports the Palestinian cause.