SYRIAN insurgents attacked army positions in the southern desert on Tuesday night as relations with their US backers fractured.

The Ahmad al-Abdu and Osoud al-Sharqia factions of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) claimed that they had seized Bir Mahroutha and Umm Rumam.

The villages lie in the southern Badia or desert region to the west of al-Tanf on the Iraqi border, where occupying US and British special forces have set up shop and declared a 35-mile exclusion zone to Syrian troops.