Free Syrian Army (FSA) said Thursday that its fighters had taken control of an air defence base near the northern province of Aleppo, enhancing their positions in a key area near the Syrian-Turkish border, dpa reported. We are now controlling 65 per cent of the area, which stretches from Aleppo and reaches the Turkish-Syrian border," Abu Omar al-Halabi, a Syrian opposition commander in Aleppo, told dpa by phone. He added that FSA fighters in the northern province of Idlib had also taken control of several key government checkpoints in the area. Elsewhere, government aircraft struck FSA-held areas located between Daraya and Kfar Sooussa on the outskirts of the capital Damascus, activists said. Meanwhile, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based activist group, released a video showing what it said was a Ukrainian journalist, who was detained by FSA fighters in the central province of Homs in October for being an alleged spy for Russia. Ankhar Kochneva, 40, worked as an interpreter for a Russian television crew. Kochneva, wearing a veil, said in the video: "I came to Syria in January 2012 as a journalist with a forged ID, but my main task was to translate between Syrian officers and their Russian counterpart. "I'm here (in Syria) at the behest of the Russian intelligence," she added in Arabic. Russia is a main ally of the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
