ISIS gains territory near Turkish border

ISIS fighters captured territory from Syrian rebels near the Turkish border on Friday and inched closer to a town on a supply route for foreign-backed insurgents fighting the militants, a monitoring group said.

The ultra-hardline group has been fighting against rebels in the area for several months. The rebels, who are supplied via Turkey, last month staged a major push against ISIS, but the group counter-attacked and beat them back.

The United States has identified the area north of Syria's former commercial hub Aleppo as a priority in the fight against ISIS.

The British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said Friday's advance was the biggest by ISIS in Aleppo province for two years. It brought the militants to within 5 km (3 miles) of Azaz, a town near the border with Turkey through which insurgents have been supplied.

ISIS said in an online statement it had captured several villages near Azaz.

International medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres said it evacuated patients and staff from a hospital in the area as the fighting got closer, and that tens of thousands of people were trapped between the front lines and Turkish border.

A Syrian NGO operating in the area said the latest assault by ISIS had displaced 20,000 more people toward Turkey.

The advance also cut rebel supply lines from Azaz to the town of Marea farther southeast, isolating the latter from other rebel-held areas, the Observatory said.

In April, ISIS militants seized another strategic town near the Turkish border from rebel factions fighting under the banner of the Free Syrian Army.

The ISIS advances on Friday encroach on a corridor of rebel-held territory that leads from the Turkish border toward Aleppo city, which is divided between insurgent and government control.

Aleppo's northern countryside is the theater of several separate battles between multiple warring sides in the five-year Syrian conflict, which has drawn in military involvement of regional and world powers that back different groups.

Rebels supplied through Turkey have been fighting ISIS and separately battling Kurdish forces in other areas.

Ankara is concerned by Kurdish advances along its border, where the Kurdish YPG militia already controls an uninterrupted 400 km (250 mile) stretch.

The United States supports the YPG and allied fighters in its battle against ISIS farther east, including in Hasaka and Raqqa provinces.

The predominantly Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), who are fighting for their autonomy in the multilayered conflict, also gained ground against the rebels.

That left the rebels in Aleppo with just one narrow corridor to the outside world, through Idlib province. Those in Azaz are now squeezed between ISIS to the east and the SDF to the west and south, while Turkey tightly restricts the flow of goods and people through the border.

Separately, al Qaeda's Syrian affiliate Nusra Front and other insurgents late on Thursday seized control of a town south of Damascus from government forces.

Nusra Front said in a statement it had captured Deir Khabiyeh, which is near an area where government forces and allies have sought to tighten control of a road leading south.

Last week, government forces and Lebanese Hezbollah captured territory in Damascus's eastern suburbs from insurgents.

Nusra Front and ISIS are rivals in the Syrian conflict and have been fighting each other, including near Damascus, in separate battles from those between insurgents and government forces.

On Thursday, Staffan de Mistura, the UN envoy for Syria, said he plans for a resumption of peace talks "as soon as feasible" between the government and opposition but that he set no new date and expects that it will "certainly not" come within the next two to three weeks, his office said.

The lack of a firm date for negotiations testifies to continued violence in Syria and difficulties for UN efforts to ship humanitarian aid to beleaguered Syrians amid fighting between President Bashar Assad's troops and their allies and rebel fighters. The talks were suspended last month with little to no progress.

(With Reuters and AP)