DHAKA: Syrian president Bashar Assad said on Sunday the army had been forced to give up areas in order to hold onto more important ones in its fight with insurgents, and the scale of the war meant the military faced a manpower shortage.

In a remarkably frank assessment of the strains afflicting the Syrian military after more than four years of conflict, Assad said the type of war confronting Syria meant the army could not fight everywhere for risk of losing vital ground.

‘Sometimes, in some circumstances, we are forced to give up areas to move those forces to the areas that we want to hold onto,’ Assad said in a televised speech, reports The Jerusalem Post.

‘We must define the important regions that the armed forces hold onto so it doesn’t allow the collapse of the rest of the areas.’

Assad has absorbed a series of battlefield defeats since March.

He lost most of the northwestern province of Idlib to an insurgent alliance including the al-Qaida-backed Nusra Front, and important areas of the southern region along the border with Jordan to mainstream groups of the ‘Southern Front’.

In addition, ultra-hardline Islamic State (IS) insurgents seized the central city of Palmyra from the Syrian military in May.

BDST: 2140 HRS, JULY 26, 2015
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