BEIRUT — Syrian rebels captured large parts of a military base in the strategic Homs province Thursday as opposition fighters try to expand territory under their control near the Lebanese border, activists said. The central region is important to President Bashar Al-Assad because it links Damascus, his seat of power, with one of his main allies, the militant Hezbollah group in neighboring Lebanon. The latest rebel advances came a day after Assad accused the West of backing Al-Qaida in Syria's 2-year-old conflict. In a rare TV interview, Assad also lashed out at Jordan for allowing "thousands" of fighters to enter Syria to fight in the civil war. In recent months, the rebels have chipped away at the regime's hold in northern and eastern Syria. They have also made significant gains in the south, in the area between Damascus and the Jordanian border, helped in part by a recent influx of foreign-funded weapons across the boundary. The Britain-based Observatory for Human Rights said the opposition fighters took control of most of the Dabaa military complex in Homs province Thursday morning, after weeks of fighting with government forces for control of the facility. Sporadic fighting was still being reported in some parts of the base, the observatory said. Dabaa is a former air force base and has an airfield, which hasn't been used since the fighting broke out. Instead, the army has based ground troops in the facility to fight the rebels, the observatory said. It did not say how many — if any — government troops were at the base when it was overrun by rebels. The base is located near Qusair, a contested central Syrian town near a key highway between Damascus and the coastal enclave that is the heartland of Syria's Alawite community. The area also is home to the country's two main seaports, Latakia and Tartus. Meanwhile, the key Syrian National Coalition rebel grouping Thursday slammed President Al-Assad, saying an interview he gave a day earlier showed the embattled leader's "isolation from reality." The opposition coalition said Assad's interview with Syrian state television "revealed his isolation from reality and blindness to the corruption and devastation and bloodshed that he has wreaked." Assad's "approach is like that of tyrants before him," it said, pointing to "his claims of control and denial of the other and the absence of reality and proposal of solutions that bear no relation to the crises." On Wednesday Al-Ikhbariya news channel broadcast an interview with Assad in which he warned that the West would pay a heavy price for what he called its support of Al-Qaeda. "The West has paid heavily for funding Al-Qaeda in its early stages in Afghanistan. Today it is doing the same in Syria, Libya and other places, and will pay a heavy price in the heart of Europe and the United States," Assad said. — Agencies
