Three hours after the Syrian Arab Army’s 87th Brigade of the 11th Tank Division captured the strategic hilltop at Tal Sheikh Khattab, the Syrian Al-Qaeda group “Jabhat Al-Nusra” and their allies from Harakat Ahrar Al-Sham and Ansar Al-Sham launched a counter-assault to recapture this hill near the city of Jisr Al-Shughour in the northwestern country of the Idlib Governorate.
However, the aforementioned Islamist groups that form the largest forces in “Jaysh Al-Fateh” conducted a sloppy and poorly planned counter-assault at the northern perimeter of Tal Sheikh Khattab, leaving themselves exposed to the Syrian Arab Air Force’s (SAAF) multitude of relentless airstrikes on their positions in broad daylight.
Following their first attempt to break-through the Syrian Arab Army’s frontlines at the northern perimeter of Tal Sheikh Al-Khattab, Jaysh Al-Fateh suffered an estimated 30 casualties, including their field commander “Abu ‘Abdullah Al-Jazrawi” (Saudi) and a number of his foreign and domestic fighters that were identified as “Umar Al-Uzbeki” (Uzbek), “Abu Hamza Al-Musri” (Egyptian), “Abu Habibi Al-Musri” (Egyptian), “Abu Jaber Al-Ansari”, “Abu Hajar Al-Raqawi”, and “Abu Harirah Al-Homsi.”
Jaysh Al-Fateh’s second attempt to recapture this strategic hilltop was also repelled by the Syrian Armed Forces, resulting in the death of an estimated two dozen enemy combatants and the destruction of three armored vehicles by the Syrian Air Forces before the Islamist forces would finally call it quits and withdraw to the north.
According to a military source in the Al-Ghaab Plains, the Syrian Armed Forces killed an estimated 50 plus enemy combatants, while only suffering a total of 9 casualties – to be fair, the majority of the casualties sustained by the Jaysh Al-Fateh were a result of their failed counter-attack.
