Activists say Syrian opposition fighters are battling troops loyal to President Bashar Al-Assad for control of the country's largest dam. Rami Abdul-Rahman, a Britain-based anti-regime activist, says there are sporadic clashes taking place around the Al-Furat dam on the Euphrates River in the northeastern province of Raqqa. He says a group of Al-Assad loyalists is held up Monday in the dam's control room but that most of the regime troops stopped fighting the day before after the opposition fighters overran the nearby town of Al-Thawra, according to a report of the Associated Press. The fall of al-Furat dam into the opposition hands would be a significant blow to the regime because it supplies water to much of Syria. Abdul-Rahman, who heads the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, says the opposition fighters already control two other dams on the Euphrates.
