On April 8, Hayat Tahrir Al Sham (HTS) members captured many points inside the Al Minshyah neighborhood in the Syrian city of Daraa. Militants captured Al-La’abeen and Syriatel checkpoints inside the neighborhood. As a result of this advance, HTS is now controlling over 75% of the strategic neighborhood.
HTS announced that its fighters had captured 4 Syrian Army soldiers so far during the battle in Al-Minshyah.
HTS members also destroyed a Syrian Army HQ in the neighborhood with a heavy self-made rocket.
Moreover the group claimed destroying a Syrian tank in Al-Minshyah with a TOW missile, but no video was released so far.
The Syrian and Russian air forces targeted HTS positions in the Daraa Al-Balad area with dozens of airstrikes aiming to stop the group advance. Russian air force also targeted an HTS command center in Al-Taibeh village in the Daraa countryside.
However, the Syrian army failed to stop the HTS attack although many reinforcement from Hezbollah and the National Defense Forces had been sent to support this move. According to sources in the SAA who are now in Daraa city.. the main reason of this fail was an unsuccessful attempt to regroup the deployed forces and a lack of coordination with the SAA’s allies as well as many wrong orders by the 15th Division Command.
