The militant attack forced the army to redeploy and clashes were ongoing, SANA added MOSCOW, BEIRUT: Militants launched a major attack on Syrian regime forces in Idlib on Thursday that Russia’s Defense Ministry said killed up to 40 Syrian soldiers, though the account was disputed by an opposition official and war monitor. Idlib is the last opposition-controlled swath of territory in the country and hundreds of thousands of people in the area have fled in recent weeks amid heavy airstrikes by Russian and Syrian forces. Russia’s Defense Ministry said that militants had seized two settlements in one of the offensives, which began on Wednesday, forcing Syrian regime troops to abandon some of their positions in the southeast of the so-called Idlib de-escalation zone under rocket fire. Syrian regime media made no mention of army casualties, but said an attack that included car bombs and heavy gunfire early on Thursday had forced some of its forces to redeploy. Naji Al-Mustafa, spokesman for the National Liberation Front coalition of opposition groups, disputed the regime media and Russian government accounts and said no such assault had taken place on Wednesday or Thursday. Mustafa said attacks had been carried out against regime forces earlier in the week as a response to stepped up strikes against them in Idlib, but the area had seen no operations over the past 24 hours. Russia, which is helping President Bashar Assad’s forces, said Syrian regime forces had killed up to 50 militants and wounded up to 90. Moscow said the attackers were from different groups, including the Islamic Party of Turkestan and Tahrir Al-Sham, the latest incarnation of the former Nusra Front that was part of Al-Qaeda until 2016. The militants were equipped with pickup trucks, armored personnel carriers, tanks and heavy machine guns, it said. The Syrian Observatory war monitor also said there was no attack on regime forces in Idlib, but that it had recorded about 400 Russian and Syrian airstrikes on the area since Wednesday, part of a stepped-up assault since December. It said eight civilians, including five children, were killed in Russia’s airstrikes in Idlib. Five civilians from the same family were killed in Saraqeb and three others in the town of Arnaba, it said. “The region is witnessing very intense bombardment by Russian warplanes,” Rami Abdel Rahman, the head of the Britain-based monitoring group, said. Idlib province is a dead end for people displaced from other formerly opposition-held parts of the country that regime forces have retaken. The violence in northern Syria is escalating an already dire humanitarian situation, with aid groups warning of displacement on an unprecedented scale. According to the UN humanitarian coordination agency OCHA, almost 350,000 people have fled their homes since Dec. 1, mainly northward from southern Idlib. The International Rescue Committee has warned another 650,000 people, mostly children and women, could be forced from their homes if the violence continues.