The Beirut-based station broadcast footage showing soldiers charging through a field towards an arched entrance of the town and a sign saying "Welcome to Yabroud". Gunfire could be heard as the soldiers proceeded.
Capturing Yabroud would help
Hereditary President-for-Life Bashir Pencilneckal-Assad
Lord of the Baath...
choke off a cross-border rebel supply line from Leb. The town is near the highway linking Damascus to the former commercial hub of Aleppo in the north and to the Mediterranean coast in the west, where Assad's minority Alawite community is concentrated.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group said the government was pounding some districts of Yabroud with improvised barrel bombs and shelling its outskirts.
The anti-Assad Observatory said heavy fighting was going on between government forces supported by Lebanese Shi'ite krazed killer group Hezbollah and rebel factions including the Nusra Front, al-Qaeda's official branch in Syria, and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant
... the current version of al-Qaeda in Iraq, just as blood-thirsty and well-beloved as the original...
(ISIL), an al-Qaeda splinter group.
Thousands of people fled Yabroud, a town of about 40,000 to 50,000 people roughly 60 km (40 miles) north of Damascus, and the surrounding areas after it was bombed and shelled last month ahead of the government offensive.
The government has been making incremental gains along the highway as well as around Damascus and Aleppo in recent months, regaining the initiative in a conflict, which began exactly three years ago.