SYRIAN troops recaptured a key town in Aleppo province from Saudi-backed extremists yesterday.

An army brigade, backed by Lebanese Hezbollah guerillas, the Iraqi volunteer Harakat al-Nujaba militia and other allied forces, launched the operation on Tuesday night.

Sources told Al-Masdar News that an Iranian airborne special forces brigade, recently deployed to Syria in an ostensibly advisory role, also took part in the assault.

Russian jets blitzed militant postions in support of the assault, which reversed rebel gains of the previous three days.

By early yesterday they had cleared the town of al-Eis and neighbouring villages of the insurgents, who had captured it on Sunday in a major breach of the Russian-US brokered ceasefire.

Ahrar ash-Sham, one of the two major forces in the Saudi-convened High Negotiations Committee at the Geneva peace talks, joined with the al-Qaida-affiliated Nusra Front in attacking government lines east of their stronghold of Idlib.

Under the terms of December’s UN security council resolution that paved the way for peace talks, Ahrar ash-Sham was meant to break its alliance with Nusra, dubbed the Army of Conquest.

The breach casts doubt on whether the next round of the recently adjourned talks can proceed.

Separately, the pilot of a Syrian military jet shot down by a foreign-supplied surface-to-air missile was named yesterday as Khaled Said.

On Tuesday, Western nations on the UN security council vetoed a Russian motion to include the Syrian Kurdish Democratic Union Party in the Geneva talks.

Moscow’s UN envoy Vitaly Churkin warned that the motion’s rejection — a possible sop to Nato-member Turkey — would undermine the peace process.

Yesterday, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova hit out at Turkey, a major backer of Syrian Islamist extremists, for its brutal military campaign against its own Kurdish population, in the guise of fighting Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) guerillas.

“We again call on Ankara to give up betting on the dead-end method of force in solving the Kurdish problem,” she said.