Qaeda Affiliate Seizes Crossing Point With Golan Heights

LONDON - After a lengthy campaign culminating in fierce clashes, Islamist opposition fighters in Syria, including members of an Al Qaeda affiliate, took control of the Quneitra crossing point on the demarcation line with the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, activists said on Wednesday.

The move could bring Islamist forces within 200 yards of territory controlled by Israel; the status of a United Nations force that is supposed to monitor the crossing point was unclear. An activist in the area, contacted by Skype, said a coalition of Islamists, including members of the Qaeda-linked Nusra Front, opened an assault on the crossing early Wednesday.

It was not clear whether the assault was in any way related to the far more dramatic eastward advance of the rival and more extreme Sunni militant group, Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, whose forces have spread from Syria and now threaten northern and central Iraq.

The Israeli military said one soldier was wounded by 'errant fire' from the clashes at Quneitra on Wednesday, prompting an artillery barrage against two Syrian Army positions in the Golan Hights - the latest of several occasions when Syria's civil war has spilled into Israel, prompting retaliation. Israel has said it has no interest in further involvement in the fighting.

The Syria conflict is now in its fourth year with an estimated death toll in excess of 190,000.

Israeli troops saw large plumes of smoke as gunfire and explosions rattled the area, news reports said.

Yaakov Amidror, a former Israeli national security adviser, said reports of the Nusra Front taking control of the Quneitra crossing could be 'very significant' if the group managed to link that position to its stronghold in Dara'a, in southern Syria, and other areas.

'It might put a threat on the ability to land in Damascus International, and that would be a huge problem for the Assad regime,' Mr. Amidror said in a conference call with reporters, referring to the airport in the Syrian capital.

But Mr. Amidror, who served under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, said Israel should not in the conflict and should respond only if attacked or to provide humanitarian assistance to wounded people on the demarcation line.

'We should be very clear about our red lines,' he said. 'No one will cross the border. If someone will try, we will kill him. And if someone will launch rockets or artillery to Israel, our retaliation will be immediate.'

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an activist group based in Britain that gathers information from contacts inside Syria, said the fighting killed at least 20 government soldiers and an unknown number of the attackers.

Quneitra has long been depicted by the authorities in Damascus as an emblem of Israeli expansion ever since Syria lost the strategic Golan Heights in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. Israeli later annexed the area.

Although the ruined town has little strategic value, insurgents have been fighting to drive off government forces for more than a year, said Abu Mossab, another activist in the region.

Accounts of the fighting were unclear, but some activists said members of the Western-backed and secular Free Syrian Army were also involved in the assault. Clashes were reported from several locations after rebel forces set out from a village they seized in May.

Earlier this year, the leader of Al Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahiri, ordered ISIS forces to leave operations in Syria to the Nusra Front.

ISIS ignored the call, and on Sunday its forces took over a military base in northern Syria, cementing its control of its self-declared Islamic State spanning the Syria-Iraq border. A day later, Syria's foreign minister said his government was ready to cooperate with international efforts to confront ISIS.