BEIRUT: Twin militant Islamic State group suicide attacks killed 15 people in Syria’s northern province of Aleppo, where the jihadists have faced simultaneous assaults in recent weeks, a monitor said on Sunday.

One attacker detonated a car bomb near the IS-held town of Deir Hafer, killing eight fighters with regime forces late on Saturday, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group said. IS claimed responsibility for the attack, saying it “was carried out by fighter Abu Abdullah al-Shami with an explosive-laden vehicle”.

Deir Hafer lies on a key road linking Aleppo city to the IS-controlled town of Khafsah, which holds the main station to pump water into Aleppo, and further east to the jihadist group’s de facto capital Raqqa. Residents of Aleppo city have been without main station water for 48 days after the jihadists cut the supply.

On Sunday, Russian and regime war planes bombarded IS positions in support of Syrian troops, which had advanced to nine kilometres from Khafsah, the Observatory said. They were just six kilometres from the pumping station, Observatory head Rami Abdel Rahman said.

The United Nations on Sunday said 26,000 people had fled the fighting since late February, while the Observatory said as many as 30,000 had been displaced.

In a second attack, IS said a fighter “detonated his suicide belt” in the rebel-held town of Azaz, also in Aleppo province. The Observatory said the suicide attack in the town “killed seven fighters and wounded several others, some of them in critical condition”.

Air strikes on the north-western province of Idlib on Sunday killed six people, including five members of the same family, the Observatory said. The raids on the town of Kafranbel also wounded 21 people.

Crashed Syrian plane’s pilot in Turkish hospital

A Syrian military pilot whose aircraft crashed in Turkey near the two countries’ border is in hospital having been found after a nine-hour search, the Anadolu news agency said on Sunday.

According to the Turkish report, the 56-year-old Syrian colonel managed to jump out of the aircraft after pulling his parachute as the plane was going down. He was recovered during an air and ground search and taken to a local hospital on Saturday night in the Turkish province of Hatay.

Turkish Deputy Prime Minister Nurettin Canikli, quoted by state-run agency Anadolu, said the pilot suffered multiple fractures and was still being treated as of Sunday. Anadolu said the pilot was flying alone when the plane crashed.

A Syrian military source quoted by state television on Saturday said “contact was lost with a military aircraft on a reconnaissance mission near the Turkish border”.

The Syrian rebel group Ahrar al-Sham told AFP that it had shot down a government plane “as it was overflying Idlib province [in north-western Syria] and carrying out air strikes”. The pilot confirmed that he was sent from the western port city of Latakia to Idlib to carry out air strikes, where his plane was brought down, according to Anadolu.

Asked whether the pilot would be sent back to Syria, Canikli said a decision would be made “once all details have been clarified”.

Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim, quoted by Anadolu, had said on Saturday that the cause of the crash was unknown, but he pointed to poor weather conditions at the time.

Turkey launched a military campaign inside Syria in August, backing opposition rebels who captured a number of towns from IS militants, including Al Bab near the Turkish border.

Published in Dawn, March 6th, 2017