DAMASCUS Gunmen killed a TV correspondent for a Syrian channel and wounded two other station employees Monday who were covering clashes near the border with Lebanon, Syria’s government said, as regime troops backed by fighters from the Lebanese Hezbollah advanced on a rebel-held town in the strategic area.
The fighting around the town of Qusair has taken a heavy toll on both the rebel and government forces, including the regime’s Hezbollah allies. An activist group said the Lebanese militia has lost nearly 80 fighters this month, most of them in Qusair.
Syria’s Information Ministry said Yara Abbas, a prominent female war reporter for state-owned Al-Ikhbariyah TV, was attacked by rebels near the Dabaa military air base in the central province of Homs. The ministry said in a statement carried by state TV that the car carrying Abbas and her crew was ambushed in Dabaa.
The attack also wounded two other of the station’s employees, a cameraman and his assistant, according to state TV.
Dozens of journalists have been killed, wounded or kidnapped since Syria’s crisis began in March 2011.
Dabaa air base is located near Qusair, which has been under attack by government forces and Hezbollah fighters since last week.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported fighting in Qusair and Dabaa early Monday. It said troops and Hezbollah fighters captured the nearby town of Hamidiyeh, tightening the siege on Qusair.
On Saturday, Hezbollah’s leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah firmly linked his militant group’s fate to the survival of the Syrian regime, raising the stakes not just in Syria, but also in Hezbollah’s relations with rival groups in Lebanon.
Qusair’s value lies in its location along a land corridor linking two of Assad’s strongholds, the capital of Damascus and towns on the Mediterranean coast, the heartland of his minority Alawite sect. For the rebels, holding Qusair means protecting a supply line to Lebanon, 10 kilometers (six miles) away.
Journalists covering Syria’s bloody conflict, on both the government and rebel sides of the front lines, have been caught in the crossfire or targeted on several occasions.
Syria’s state-run Al-Thawra daily reported last week that nine journalists and 23 other crew members working for state-run media have been killed in the country over the past two years. Agencies
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