Islamist insurgents have captured the Syrian city of Hama in a battle to seize a vital location on the road to Damascus, marking the latest challenge to Bashar al-Assad’s control of the country. Militants led by the group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) entered the city from the east on Thursday after surrounding it during five days of fighting with forces loyal to Assad. Video circulating online suggested that the insurgents had captured a military airport outside Hama, and released prisoners held in a fearsome state detention facility. As night fell, militant representatives said they had “fully established control over the city of Hama,” and called on police and militias in the city to defect. “This victory will be without revenge and merciful,” said the leader of HTS, Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, in a message to the people of Hama. The Syrian defence ministry initially denied that insurgents had enteredHama, calling its defensive lines “impregnable”. But as fighting intensified and drew closer to the city centre, the Syrian army said it had withdrawn, redeploying its forces “to preserve the lives of civilians and not to involve the people of Hama city in these battles”. Positioned on a highway that runs down the western side of Syria towards the capital, Damascus, Hama was the site of mass uprisings against Assad in 2011, and then fierce battles when opposition forces attempted and failed to take control of the city in the ensuing civil war. Hama is also the site of a notorious 1982 massacre, when forces loyal to former president Hafez al-Assad besieged the town to prevent an uprising led by Sunni Muslim opponents of his rule. The sweeping offensive led by HTS has resulted in Assad losing control of Syria’s second largest city, Aleppo, and swaths of the northwest of the country. The UN’s World Food Programme said the escalation has displaced more than 280,000 people, “adding to years of suffering.” The surge in violence has led to fears of an aid crisis, with UN secretary general Antonio Guterres speaking of an urgent need for civilian access to immediate humanitarian support, and a parish priest in Aleppo, Father Bahjat Karakach, voicing concerns that the fear of the bombing is giving way to the “danger of hunger” amid soaring food prices. Guterres urged a UN-facilitated political process to end the bloodshed, asking “all those with influence to do their part for the long-suffering people” of Syria and noting all parties had an obligation to protect civilians. On Friday, Iraqi foreign minister Fuad Hussein will meet his Syrian and Iranian counterparts in Baghdad to discuss the situation in Syria, the Iraqi state news agency reported.The move comes days after emergency talks were held in Ankara. Some Iraqi fighters entered Syria early this week to support Assad, Iraqi and Syrian sources told Reuters. Iraq’s Iran-aligned Hashd al-Shaabi paramilitary coalition has mobilised along the border with Syria, saying this was purely preventive in case of spillover into Iraq. Tens of thousands of members of Assad’s Alawite minority community were fleeing Syria’s third city Homs on Thursday, for fear that Islamist-led rebels would keep up their advance, a war monitor said. Homs lies just 40km (25 miles) south of Hama. Britain-based war monitor the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported “the mass exodus of Alawites from Homs neighbourhoods, with tens of thousands heading towards the Syrian coast, fearing the rebel advance”. Khaled, who lives on the city’s outskirts told Agence France-Presse that “the road leading to [coastal] Tartus province was glowing ... due to the lights of hundreds of cars on their way out”. Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan told Guterres in a phone call that the conflict in Syria had reached “a new phase.” “The Syrian regime, at this stage, must urgently engage with its own people for a comprehensive political solution,” he said. The sudden losses appear to have unsettled Assad’s longtime backers in Moscow and Tehran, with Russian forces consumed with their invasion of Ukraine and Iran concerned about its forces being targeted by Israeli airstrikes on Syrian territory, which have increased in the last year. Naim Qassem, head of Iranian proxy Hezbollah in Lebanon that has fought in support of Assad, pledged to “stand by Syria to thwart the aggression against it.” The Kremlin spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, told reporters that Moscow was “closely monitoring”, events in Syria. “Depending on the assessment of the situation, we will be able to talk about the degree of assistance that is needed by the Syrian authorities to cope with the militants and eliminate this threat,” he said. Gregory Waters, an analyst of the Syrian army with the Middle East Institute, said a combination of low morale, low pay, corruption and dysfunction within the chain of command had contributed to the sudden rout of government forces from areas they had controlled for years. The Syrian army, he said, was “completely unprepared”, for the insurgent offensive. Amid reports of rising desertions from the Syrian army or fighters fleeing their positions, Assad issued a decree raising salaries for military personnel by 50% earlier this week. The Syrian president appeared to be seeking to muster a counter-offensive as the fighting drew closer to the capital. Military support from Iran and Russia has been limited when compared with previous iterations of the conflict in Syria, said Waters. “I think it’s hard to see a scenario where forces loyal to the regime in Damascus can regain momentum,” he said. “Even if the Russians and Iranian or Iranian-backed forces get more involved, they’re still limited by their own wars. It feels unlikely to reach the level of support we’ve seen previously.”