BEIRUT -- Syrians fled Idlib on Sunday, fearing government reprisals a day after opposition fighters and a powerful local al-Qaida affiliate captured the northwestern town, activists said.
Idlib, with a population of around 165,000 people, is the second provincial capital to fall to the opposition after Raqqa, which is now a stronghold of the Islamic State group. Its capture by several factions led by the al-Qaida-linked Nusra Front underscores the growing power of extremist groups in Syria, which now control about half the country.
The Nusra Front and Syrian rebels have controlled the countryside and towns across Idlib province since 2012, but President Bashar Assad's forces had maintained their grip on Idlib city, near the border with Turkey, throughout the conflict.
Now that the city is in the hands of rebels, who stormed government buildings and tore down posters of Assad, many residents fear that troops will retaliate harshly.
Muayad Zurayk, an activist based in Idlib province, said via Skype that "residents are fleeing the city to nearby villages and towns." He added that the situation was relatively quiet in the city Sunday despite some government shelling.
Al-Jazeera television said Sunday that the army was preparing an offensive to recapture the city.
Rami Abdurrahman, who heads the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, confirmed some people were fleeing the city.
The military bombarded Idlib city and surrounding areas after its fall, the Observatory said.
Idlib is near the strategic highway linking Damascus to Aleppo, Syria's former commercial hub and site of some of the fiercest fighting in the four-year war.
Also in Idlib, activists said members of a Syrian security agency killed more than a dozen detainees before withdrawing from a detention center in the city. The activists said the killings were conducted shortly before rebels took the so-called security compound in Idlib on Saturday.
The Idlib Media Center showed a video of what it said were at least 12 bloodied bodies inside a room at the Military Intelligence Directorate.
The Observatory said 15 men were found shot dead inside the compound. The group said 53 other detainees, including two women, were freed by the rebels in the compound.
The capture of Idlib could undermine Assad's claim to have the upper hand in the country's civil war and stir unrest among his supporters, analysts said.
"The fall of Idlib will represent a big shock within the regime and its supporting circles," Charles Lister, a specialist in Middle East insurgents and visiting fellow at the Brookings Doha Center, said in an email. The Syrian economy is in "dire straits," the military appears to be experiencing notable losses, and public frustration has appeared within pro-Assad parts of the country, he said.
Idlib's fall undercuts Assad's claims that he is getting close to defeating the groups that his government labels as terrorists, according to Emile Hokayem, a senior fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies-Middle East in Manama, Bahrain. Islamist factions have shown their ability to cooperate militarily, he said.
"The big question now is the governance of Idlib," Hokayem said. "Should harsh Islamist rule be imposed, the fall of the city may actually deter further urbanites in Damascus and elsewhere from mobilizing in favor of the rebellion."
More than 220,000 people have been killed in Syria's conflict, which began with an Arab Spring uprising in March 2011 and turned into an insurgency after a brutal military crackdown.
Militants behead 8
Meanwhile, a new video released by the Islamic State on Sunday shows its fighters cutting off the heads of eight men said to be Shiite Muslims. The video posted on social media said the men were beheaded in the central Syrian province of Hama.
The video could not be immediately independently verified, but it appeared genuine and corresponded to other Associated Press reporting of the events. The Observatory also said that the video was authentic.
Islamic State extremists have beheaded scores of people since capturing large parts of Iraq and Syria last year in a self-declared caliphate.
In the video, the men, wearing orange uniforms with their hands tied behind their backs, were led forward in a field by teenage boys. They were then handed over to a group of Islamic State fighters. A boy wearing a black uniform hands out knives to the fighters, who then behead the hostages.
An Islamic State fighter speaks in the video, using a derogatory term for Shiites and calling them "impure infidels." The fighter said in the video that the current military campaign against the Islamic State will only make the militant group stronger.
"Our swords will soon, God willing, reach the Nuseiries and their allies like Bashar and his party," the man said referring to Assad and Lebanon's militant Hezbollah group that is fighting on his side. The word Nuseiry is a derogatory term to refer to Assad's Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shiite Islam.
In Lebanon, the state-run National News Agency quoted the family of Younes Hujairi, who was kidnapped from his hometown of Arsal near the Syrian border in January, as saying he had been beheaded. The agency quoted members of Hujairi's family as saying they have seen pictures of an Islamic State fighter carrying his severed head on social media.
It was not clear if Hujairi was one of one of the men beheaded in the video. Hujairi is a Sunni, while the video states that all the beheaded men were Shiites.
The border town of Arsal, where Hujairi was kidnapped, was also the site of a joint raid by the Islamic State and the Nusra Front in August that captured two dozen Lebanese soldiers and policemen. Four of those hostages have been killed so far, two of them beheaded by the Islamic State. The remaining 20 soldiers and policemen remain hostages.
Also Sunday, United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees spokesman Christopher Gunness said just 4 percent of emergency work in Syria for Palestinians has been funded so far this year.
He said the agency needs around $415 million, of which $250 million would fund its cash program -- which provides cash distributions for roughly half a million Palestinian refugees affected by the war in Syria.
Gunness spoke from Kuwait, where an international conference will take place Tuesday to raise funds for humanitarian operations in Syria.
"We're not crying wolf here. If we don't receive the funds for this program at this conference in Kuwait we are going to have to cease in a matter of days our vital cash assistance program," he said.
"It will be devastating," he added. "This is literally a lifeline. It is quite literally a matter of life and death."
More than 95 percent of Palestinian refugees from Syria rely on agency assistance, particularly the cash distributions due to high unemployment caused by the Syrian civil war. The agency's relief reaches some 475,000 Palestinian refugees still residing in Syria, with another 45,000 in Lebanon and 15,000 in Jordan, where many have fled.
Gunness said that last year, the agency's emergency budget of $417 million was only 52 percent funded. As a result, the agency had to slash its rounds of cash distribution in half and beneficiaries received just $16 per month, or around 60 cents a day.
At last year's donors' conference in Kuwait, nearly 40 nations and key organizations pledged $2.4 billion for overall needs in Syria. But $585 million had not been paid, according to information released in November by the U.N. humanitarian office's Financial Tracking Service.
Information for this article was contributed by Aya Batrawy and staff members of The Associated Press and by Nafeesa Syeed of Bloomberg News.
A Section on 03/30/2015