Rebels led by the Syrian al-Qaeda affiliate have besieged a village of the minority Druze community on the Syrian side of the Golan Heights, activists said Wednesday.
"The Druze village of Hader is currently surrounded by rebels after they took a strategic hill north of the village," said Rami Abdel-Rahman, the head of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
Hader is mainly controlled by Syrian regime forces, he told dpa.
Fighting on the periphery of the village broke out on Tuesday and has since left at least ten rebels and 14 pro-regime fighters dead, Abdel-Rahman said.
Members of the Druze community who live on the Israeli side of the Golan demonstrated against the siege of Hader.
Last week, the Syrian al-Qaeda branch, al-Nusra Front, killed 20 Druze villagers in the northwestern province of Idlib.
The Druze community in Syria makes up 3 percent of Syria's pre-war population of 23 million, and are mainly concentrated in the southern province of Suweida.
Many Druze have sought to remain neutral since the outbreak of the Syrian uprising in 2011, but some have joined local pro-government militias in Suweida and some Druze officers have played a prominent role in the army.
Also Wednesday, at least 33 people died in retaliatory attacks by the government and rebels in areas near and inside Damascus.
At least 24 civilians, including five children and 13 women, were killed by rockets fired late Tuesday by Syrian troops at the rebel-held district of Douma in the eastern suburban parts of Damascus, the Observatory said.
In retaliation, rebels shelled the central Damascus quarter of Arnus, killing nine people, according to state news agency SANA.
The suburban and central areas of Damascus have in recent months seen tit-for-tat attacks by President Bashar al-Assad's troops and rebels.
Meanwhile, Kurdish fighters seized the Syrian town of Tal Abyad near the Turkish border from the Daesh (ISIS) extremist militia.
Some 700 Syrians, previously displaced by the fight for Tal Abyad, returned to the town, the Turkish news agency DHA reported.
"Our fighters have facilitated their safe return their homes," said Idriss Nassan, a senior Kurdish official.
"Life is starting to return to normal inside the town," Nassan told dpa.
More than 23,000 Syrians have fled across the Turkish border in recent weeks as a result of heavy clashes around Tal Abyad.
The town is vital for Daesh because it is used to provide the jihadists with their most direct link from the porous Turkish border to their Syrian stronghold of al-Raqqa.
Daesh also controls vast swathes of territory in neighbouring Iraq.
The al-Qaeda splinter group has withstood months of airstrikes by a US-led military campaign in both countries.
In Washington, US Defence Secretary Ashton Carter said that his country's efforts to train Iraqi forces to fight Daesh had been slowed by a lack of recruits.
"Our training efforts in Iraq have thus far been slowed by a lack of trainees - we simply haven't received enough recruits," Carter told lawmakers at a hearing in the US Congress.
The US had planned to train 24,000 Iraqis at four sites by this autumn, but has only received enough recruits to train about 7,000 Iraqi Security Forces and 2,000 counterterrorism service personnel, Carter said.
The provision of equipment to the Iraqi forces has also proceeded "too slowly" and the US military was working to speed the delivery of anti-tank equipment and equipment to counter roadside bombs, he added.
By Weedah Hamzah
This story has been edited from the source material.
