Clashes raged in Syria on Thursday between the remnants of the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) and the currently-ruling Hayat Tahrir-Sham (HTS) extremist group several hours after over a dozen HTS militants were killed in the western Tartous governorate.
Violent armed clashes were recorded by citizens in Tartous on Thursday. Video footage also showed positions of the SAA’s 25th Division stationed in the Latakia mountains in western Syria.
HTS-led authorities announced on Thursday that they confiscated weapons belonging to former government soldiers in the Damascus countryside.
HTS’s Military Operations Administration has launched a security operation to confiscate SAA weapons and arrest “those who incite” sedition, according to a source from Syria’s new Ministry of Interior cited by Al-Watan newspaper.
Fourteen HTS militants and three armed men were killed in combat Wednesday evening in Tartous, in what was initially reported as an ambush by former government loyalists and soldiers.
Syria’s Interior Minister Mohammad Abdul Rahman confirmed on Thursday the killing of 14 HTS security personnel and the injury of 10 others carried out by "remnants of the former regime."
According to UK-based war monitor the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), the HTS militants were killed while trying to arrest an officer linked to the former government-run Sednaya prison – where thousands of prisoners were released after the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s government on December 8.
The incident came as unrest quickly spread across Syria in the past 24 hours after protests by Alawite citizens erupted across the country due to the emergence of a video showing the burning and desecration of an Alawite shrine by extremist militants.
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