BEIRUT: Militants of the Islamic State (IS) group on Friday seized a string of villages from Syrian rebels near the Turkish border in rapid advances that forced the evacuation of a hospital and trapped tens of thousands of people amid heavy fighting, Syrian opposition activists and an international medical organisation said.

The advances in the northern Aleppo province brought the militants to within three three kilometres of the rebel-held town of Azaz and cut off supplies to Marea further south, another rebel stronghold north of Aleppo city.

They also demonstrated the IS group’s ability to stage major offensives and capture new areas, despite a string of recent losses in Syria and Iraq. The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which monitors the conflict through a network of activists on the ground, said Friday’s advance was the biggest by IS in Aleppo province in two years.

Human Rights Watch said around 165,000 civilians are trapped near the Turkish border as a result of the fighting. Turkey has closed its borders with Syria for the past 15 months, and HRW says Turkish border guards enforcing the closure have at times shot at and assaulted Syrian asylum seekers as they try to reach safety in Turkey — charges the Turkish government denies. “While the world speaks about fighting ISIS, their silence is deafening when it comes to the basic rights of those fleeing ISIS,” Gerry Simpson, senior researcher with the group’s refugee programme, wrote in a dispatch.

The IS offensive began on Thursday night. By Friday, the group had captured six villages east of Azaz including Kaljibrin, cutting off rebels in Marea from the Azaz pocket.

The rebels in the area — which include mainstream opposition fighters known as the Free Syrian Army along with some ultraconservative Islamic insurgent factions — have been squeezed between IS to the east and predominantly Kurdish forces to the west and south, while Turkey restricts the flow of goods and people through the border.

Published in Dawn, May 28th, 2016