Rebel advances in the east dominate the news, but in the northeast we can see the effects of Assad's effective abandonment of most of the country.
Rebels seized a town in an eastern oil-producing province of Syria on Thursday after three days of heavy fighting in which 30 Nusra Front fighters and 100 Syrian troops were killed, a violence monitoring group said..
Taking Shaddadeh in Hasakah province from the forces of President Bashar al-Assad brings the rebels closer to the provincial capital Hasakah, 45 km (30 miles) to the north
Making progress in the oil region isn't good for Assad. He can't hold it. The garrisons out in the provinces are basically written off. How soon do these troops realize that they are just speed bumps?
Assad keeps losing.
UPDATE: Forty thousand people fled Shaddadeh to reach the safety of Hasakah:
Rebels seized al-Shaddadeh in Syria's oil-producing east on Thursday after the clashes which killed 30 of their fighters and 100 Syrian government troops, a violence monitoring group told Reuters.
"A WFP (World Food Programme) team visited the area and estimated that around 40,000 people have fled al-Shaddadeh to al-Hasakah city (the regional capital)," the U.N. agency told journalists in Geneva on Friday.
Strategypage noted that the rebels who captured Shaddadeh are Islamists. Which would explain why people might flee rather than consider themselves liberated.
