Ashraf Musa, Muhammad Misto
February 11, 2020•Update: February 12, 2020
IDLIB, Syria
Syrian opposition groups reported Tuesday that they downed a Syrian regime helicopter in a "de-escalation zone" in northwest Syria.
Opposition sources told Anadolu Agency that the helicopter was hit directly while flying over the village of Al-Naiyrab, west of the town of Saraqib.
The helicopter was moving to target opposition positions amid an ongoing push to recapture Saraqib from regime forces, they said.
Separately, saying that regime forces had withdrawn from Al-Naiyrab, part of the Idlib region, on Twitter, Turkey’s Defense Ministry confirmed that one helicopter belonging to the regime had gone down.
Flouting a cease-fire, the Assad regime and its allies have continued intensified air and land attacks on civilian settlements in the Idlib de-escalation zone.
The regime managed to take control of wide areas in Idlib and is poised to seize control of the strategic M5 highway which connects the capital Damascus to Aleppo, Syria's second-biggest city.
In September 2018, Turkey and Russia agreed to turn Idlib into a de-escalation zone in which acts of aggression are expressly prohibited.
But more than 1,800 civilians have been killed in attacks by regime and Russian forces since then, flouting both the 2018 cease-fire and a new one that started on Jan. 12.
More than 1.7 million Syrians have moved near the Turkish border due to intense attacks over the past year.
Turkey remains the country with the most refugees in the world, hosting more than 3.7 million migrants since the start of the Syrian civil war in 2011.
*Writing by Fahri Aksut; Ahmed Asmar
