Recaptured Hasaka district from Islamic State, Says Syrian Army

Amman: The Syrian army said today that it had recaptured a major residential quarter in Hasaka from Islamic State insurgents who stormed the strategically located northeastern city last week and drove out thousands of civilians.

Syrian state television said in a newsflash the army had now "cleansed" militants from the southern Hasaka district of Nashwa.

Earlier an army source said Islamic State suicide bombers blew up two trucks in the southeastern district of Ghwyran and a fire erupted at petroleum storage tanks and a textile firm following shelling by the militants.

Hasaka is divided into areas run separately by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's government and regional Kurdish authorities, and has an ethnically and religiously mixed population of Arabs and Kurds.

Islamic State is back on the offensive after two weeks of reverses at the hands of Kurdish-led forces supported by air strikes of a US-led coalition.

The jihadists control large tracts of eastern Syria four years into the country's civil war but mainly in the more thinly populated countryside. Hasaka is important for all sides in the conflict because it sits between Islamic State-held territory in Syria and in nearby Iraq.