Civil war spills into Iraq as 42 Assad troops killed

The Syrian civil war spilled over into Iraq on Monday when 49 men were killed after a convoy carrying regime troops and officials to the border was ambushed.

The loss of life of seven Iraqi police and 42 Syrians, who had fled across the border into Iraq at the weekend to escape an attack by rebel fighters, was the worst incident in the conflict to take place in a neighbouring territory.

The fight was a consequence of rebel ascendancy in the northern reaches of the country, where most of a key provincial capital, Raqqa, also fell into rebel hands yesterday, according to activists.

Pictures showed a statue of Hafez al-Assad, the father and predecessor of President Bashar al-Assad, being pulled down in the centre of Raqqa as rebels stormed the town.

The battle in Iraq shows the volatility that the Syrian conflict and the country's own internal divisions could provoke in what remains a fractured society 10 years after the allied invasion.

The 65 soldiers and officials had fled from rebel forces led by the militant group Jabhat al-Nusra, who mustered overwhelming force against the Yaarabiya border crossing in the far north-east of Syria over the weekend.

"Very many troops including Jabhat al-Nusra and other Free Syrian Army troops attacked Yaarabiya," said Ous Al-Arabi, a rebel activist in Deir al-Zour province. "They attacked this border post and they fought the regime there.

"The regime did not have a very big number of troops there. Most of the soldiers were killed and some escaped with the cooperation of Iraqi authorities and were transported to the Iraqi side of border."

From there, they were being escorted back through Iraq's Anbar province to the al-Waleed border post, which is still in Assad regime hands, when the convoy was ambushed. It is not clear who the attackers were, but Anbar is a largely Sunni province, with many local tribes spread on both sides of the border, and a high level of sympathy for the overwhelmingly Sunni Syrian opposition.

Sunni groups inside Iraq are staging their own campaigns of civil disobedience against the Baghdad government, which is Shia-led and sympathetic to the regime of Mr Assad.

"All the western side of Iraq are Sunnis and many are the cousins of Syrians living in Deir al-Zour and Raqqa and this Syrian border region," Mr Arabi said. "There is strong resistance in that area to make absolutely sure that no pro-Assad forces can come into Syria."

A band of border posts from Idlib in the north-west, bordering Turkey, round to al-Yaarabiya in the east is now in rebel hands, with control being exerted ever further south as rebels advance, taking medium-sized towns and military bases.

Rebel leaders attacked Raqqa airport on Sunday and then moved on to the city despite it supposedly being subject to a truce because of the hundreds of thousands of refugees who had fled there.

The regime is striking back in the centre and south of the country, launching a major attack on parts of Homs that have fallen into rebel hands in recent weeks.