Photographer for German press agency killed in Syria as rebels push for control of key city

By Mohammed Tawfeeq, CNN

(CNN) — A Syrian photographer working for the German press agency DPA has been killed in an airstrike in the Hama countryside, where the government forces of Bashar al-Assad are involved in fierce fighting with an advancing rebel opposition group.

DPA, or Deutsche Presse-Agentur, said its photographer Anas Alkharboutli was killed while “accompanying and reporting on the advance of the revel alliance,” in a story published on its website Wednesday.

A local journalist who witnessed the strike told CNN the 32-year-old photojournalist had been near the town of Morek, about 17 miles (27 km) north of Hama, at the time.

The northern countryside of Hama is currently the site of fierce fighting between government troops and a rebel coalition whose recent taking of Aleppo, the country’s second-biggest city, has reignited the country’s long-running civil war.

The Syrian defense ministry said Wednesday it was attacking the rebels “on all their axes of movement” and that airstrikes were being carried out by warplanes from both Syria and Russia, which backs the Assad regime.

DPA said Alkharboutli had been waiting at a bridge with journalists from other media outlets when their position was bombed twice, “presumably by Syrian government warplanes.”

He died at the scene and was buried in Idlib Wednesday, DPA said.

DPA’s editor-in-chief Sven Gösmann paid tribute to the award-winning Alkharboutli, saying “With his pictures, he not only documented the horrors of war, but always worked for the truth.”

Rebel advance

The news of the photographer’s death came as the commander of one of the rebel groups claimed to have surrounded from three directions the city of Muhradah, about 16 miles northwest of Hama.

Abu Muhammad al-Jolani, of the Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham (HTS) group, said in a statement aimed at the civilians of the predominantly Christian area that he had urged his fighters to protect them.

“We have treated the sons of the Christian faith well in Idlib (another city under rebel control) and Aleppo, and we will also be keen to protect you and preserve your property, so I call on you to be reassured and ask you to reject the psychological warfare practiced by the criminal regime, so do not leave your homes and villages,” al-Jolani said in a statement.

HTS, designated a terrorist organization by the United States, is one of several well-established armed Islamist factions who, despite their differences, are united in fighting Assad, ISIS and Iran-backed militias as part of the so-called ‘Military Operations Command’ coalition.

Also part of the coalition is the Syrian National Army – an umbrella group of factions with various ideologies that receive funding and arms from Turkey.

Following its taking of Aleppo just days ago, the rebel coalition appears to be focusing its efforts on Hama, a strategic city about 85 miles south.

Taking it would bring them closer to Syria’s Mediterranean coast.

In a statement Wednesday, HTS urged Hama’s Alawites – the minority group to which President Assad belongs – to “detach themselves from this regime.”

Hama, Syria’s fourth-largest city, is considered the regime’s first line of defense for a group of Mediterranean coastal towns and villages with large Alawite communities.

In what many interpreted as a sign of the growing pressures facing Assad, the Syrian president issued a decree Wednesday increasing the fixed salary of government military personnel by 50%.

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