MESOP SYRIA News Roundup: Thursday, July 30 / ASSADS HEARTLAND IN DANGER

Rebels seek to enter Latakia through Jabal Turkman – The latest offensive around the regime’s support base of Latakia province brings the rebels closer to the heart of the Alawite homeland with the capture of two hills in Jabal Turkman, depriving regime forces of a key “forward defensive line,” a local activist told Syria Direct Thursday.Now, the rebels “can observe Syrian regime forces’ movements” from atop these hills, said Wasim Shamdeen, a pro-opposition journalist and activist in the Jabal Turkman area.

Located roughly 60km northeast of the Assads’ home town al-Qardaha, the positions captured on Wednesday come on the heels of recent victories to the east in the Hama plains known as Sahl al-Ghab.Rebel groups including Jabhat a-Nusra and the Jabal al-Islam Brigade took part in the operation that was allegedly a response to the regime’s “Creeping Ants” campaign last month targeting opposition-held areas in Latakia, according to a pro-opposition video posted on YouTube Wednesday.Several high-ranking Syrian army defectors were arrested at a checkpoint in northeast Lebanon on Wednesday near the border town of Arsal, Lebanese state media reported, amidst elevated border security concerns. “Lebanese army intelligence [mukhabarat] arrested 10 Syrian defectors at the Ein al-Shab checkpoint,” the official Lebanese National News Agency announced on Wednesday, listing the names and ranks of several of those arrested. The army did not specifically mention why it arrested the soldiers, but the agency reported that security forces took the defectors for questioning following their arrest in the Beqaa Valley town of Labwa on Wednesday. The defected soldiers entered Lebanon on the same day and were heading south towards the Lebanese interior when they were detained, local news site Lebanon Files reported. The movement of refugees and fighters alike in both directions over Lebanon’s relatively porous northeast border with Syria stretches back to the very beginning of the four-year war in Syria, but the threat of spillover fighting at the border has led the Lebanese government to take an increasingly aggressive stance towards cross-border activity.