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Syrian rebels say they are closing in on the strategic city of Homs as they push ahead with a lightning advance southwards towards President Bashar al-Assad’s remaining strongholds.

“Our forces have liberated the last village on the outskirts of Homs city and are now at its walls,” the rebels said late on Friday evening via their Telegram channel.

Homs is the largest city still controlled by Assad’s regime on the highway that leads south to the capital Damascus. The rebels, led by Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, have already captured Aleppo, Syria’s second city, and Hama, since launching their offensive 11 days ago.

The assault poses the most serious threat to Assad’s rule in a decade, reigniting a 13-year civil war that had been largely frozen since 2020.

State media said that joint Syrian and Russian forces had shelled rebel forces in Homs’s northern suburbs.

Although much of the rebels’ advance has been met with little resistance by forces loyal to Assad, there are signs that the fighting may be more intense around Homs.

If the government were to lose Homs, analysts said, it would cut off Damascus from Assad’s other big support base in the coastal Latakia and Tartus governorates. Assad comes from the minority Alawite sect, whose population is concentrated on the coast.

The area is also crucial to Russia, which intervened in Syria’s war in 2015 to support Assad, giving Moscow access to the Mediterranean.  

HTS, which is supported by Turkish-backed factions, has taken advantage of Assad’s supporters Iran, Iranian-backed Lebanese movement Hizbollah and Russia being weakened and distracted by other conflicts. 

Russian jets have responded to the rebels’ advance with air strikes but in a sign of the crisis’ severity, Moscow warned its citizens on Friday to flee Syria. On Saturday, the New York Times reported that Iranian military commanders were being evacuated. 

Iran’s foreign ministry spokesperson Esmail Baghaei told the state news agency IRNA that its embassy in Damascus had not been evacuated. “The embassy of the Islamic republic of Iran continues its activities as usual,” he said.

Homs is close to the Syrian-Lebanese border, where Hizbollah has a large presence. Iran and Hizbollah’s support of Assad a decade ago helped shore up the dictator’s rule, but a year of war with Israel has left it weakened.

Local media reported roads were jammed with people fleeing the offensive, and HTS issued a statement addressed to the Lebanese asking them not to get drawn into the conflict.

Only one border crossing remained open between Lebanon and Syria, on the Beirut-Damascus road, after Lebanese security forces on Friday closed other entry points, citing “repeated Israeli attacks targeting land border crossings”.

The Israeli military has repeatedly targeted the crossings, and said it had struck sites close to the border on Thursday night, as it aims to cut off Hizbollah’s resupply routes from Syria.  

In Deraa, the birthplace of the Syrian revolution in 2011, Reuters reported that the rebels had reached an agreement with regime forces to withdraw. HTS said Deraa had been “liberated from the grip of the criminal regime and its militias”.

Several towns near the Jordanian border have also been claimed by opposition factions, with minimal fighting. 

State media downplayed the rapid realignment of the south, saying the army was repositioning and establishing a “security cordon” after “terrorist elements attacked the army’s scattered checkpoints with the aim of distracting our armed forces”.

But Assad has also lost ground in eastern Syria, where US-backed Kurdish fighters have taken control of Deir Ezzor city, the capital of the oil-rich province. The area was where jihadist militants Isis had been at their most expansive in Syria.

Additional reporting from Najmeh Bozorgmehr in Tehran

The U.S. Department of Agriculture issued a federal order requiring the testing of the nation’s milk supply amid increasing concerns over bird flu.

The influenza virus has been raising alarm since it was detected in a Texas cow back in March. Since then, the virus has spread to over 710 dairy herds across 15 states, with California reporting the highest number of infections. At least 58 people have been infected with bird flu, including one child living in the San Francisco Bay area.

The new federal order will give regulators the power to test samples from dairy farms or when milk is being transported or processed. Private labs will also be required to report any positive cases. The testing program is launching first in California, Colorado, Michigan, Mississippi, Oregon and Pennsylvania.

USDA said Friday the purpose of the federal order is to “identify where the disease is present, monitor trends, and help states identify potentially affected herds.”

“Among many outcomes, this will give farmers and farmworkers better confidence in the safety of their animals and ability to protect themselves, and it will put us on a path to quickly controlling and stopping the virus’ spread nationwide,” Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said in a statement.

Growing evidence suggests that the virus is spreading through dairy operations. Milk with high concentrations of the virus can easily spread within the milking parlor; through rodents and other animals; or via humans carrying infectious material on their clothing or farm equipment.

Earlier this week, California health officials detected possible bird flu contamination in raw milk and cream products from the company Raw Farm based in Fresno. Several of its products are under a recall and the farm has been placed under quarantine.

While the risks aren’t entirely clear, scientists say it’s possible consuming infected milk could lead to an infection. Meanwhile, federal health officials say pasteurized milk remains safe to drink.

The federal order will complement one issued in April which required testing of lactating dairy cows before they were shipped across state lines.

NPR’s Will Stone contributed reporting.

A US appeals court on Friday upheld a law requiring TikTok’s owner ByteDance to sell the platform or face a ban next year, dealing a major blow to the Chinese company behind the video app.

The law, signed by President Joe Biden this year, orders TikTok to be banned in the country if the app does not divest from its parent by January 19 2025 — the day before Donald Trump is inaugurated as president.

The unanimous ruling from the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit said the law — which hits at the core of a hot-button national security issue involving China and received strong bipartisan support in Congress — was constitutional and did not violate First Amendment protections for free speech, as TikTok had claimed.

The “government acted solely to protect that freedom from a foreign adversary nation and to limit that adversary’s ability to gather data on people in the United States,” the panel wrote.

The decision puts TikTok in a precarious position in one of its biggest markets, although the law’s political future is uncertain. On the campaign trail before his re-election, Trump said he opposed the platform’s ban and promised to “save” the app.

In an email to staff, TikTok chief executive Shou Zi Chew wrote that the next step would be to “seek an injunction of the ban, pending review by the US Supreme Court”, according to a person familiar with the matter. 

The law requires Apple and Google to remove the social media app, which is wildly popular among younger Generation Z users, from their app stores if a divestiture does not take place before the January deadline. It also bans the app from web-hosting services.

TikTok said after the ruling: “The Supreme Court has an established historical record of protecting Americans’ right to free speech, and we expect they will do just that on this important constitutional issue.

“Unfortunately, the TikTok ban was conceived and pushed through based upon inaccurate, flawed and hypothetical information, resulting in outright censorship of the American people.”

US attorney-general Merrick Garland called the ruling “an important step in blocking the Chinese government from weaponising TikTok to collect sensitive information about millions of Americans, to covertly manipulate the content delivered to American audiences, and to undermine our national security”.

The Chinese embassy in Washington said the law would have “a serious impact on the online social platform used by half of Americans” and was a “blatant act of commercial robbery”.

The Trump transition team did not respond to a request for comment. But Mike Waltz, the Florida lawmaker and incoming US national security adviser, told Fox Business Network that Trump “wants to save TikTok”.

“We absolutely need to allow the American people to have access to that app, but we have to protect our data as well,” said Waltz, who has in the past called for TikTok to be banned.

Waltz added that Trump’s stance was to “allow the American people to have full access to what is a great product, but at the same time protect their data”. Marco Rubio, the Florida senator and China hawk who Trump has nominated as his secretary of state, has also supported banning TikTok.

In May, TikTok and ByteDance sued the US government to block the bill, claiming it was unconstitutional and violated First Amendment protections for free speech. TikTok has denied China’s government has any control over the app or that it has handed over any data to Beijing. Its lawyers also argued concerns about propaganda on the app should be handled by requiring disclosures, rather than a blanket divest-or-ban law.

US officials have argued ByteDance could be compelled to share the personal information of the 170mn US TikTok users with officials in Beijing under Chinese law, and wield the app’s algorithms and moderation to spread propaganda and misinformation. The DoJ earlier this year alleged some of TikTok’s US user data had been stored in China.

The court on Friday said the government’s national security “justifications” for the law were “compelling”. China “poses a particularly significant hybrid commercial threat” because of the statutes governing Chinese companies, the judges said, adding Beijing also “uses its cyber capabilities to support its influence campaigns around the world”.

China has “positioned itself to manipulate public discourse on TikTok in order to serve its own ends”, the judges wrote. Its “ability to do so is at odds with free speech fundamentals”.

The judges recognised their ruling “has significant implications” for the app and its users. But they argued that “burden is attributable to [China’s] hybrid commercial threat to US national security”, rather than the US government, which “engaged with TikTok through a multiyear process in an effort to find an alternative solution”.

TikTok has complained that much of the US government’s evidence is classified, meaning it has not had the opportunity to rebuff the claims about it, and argued a sale would be “unfeasible”.

Beijing has publicly said it would not allow the divestiture of the platform’s recommendations algorithm by ByteDance, and has export control laws that would block such a spin-off. Biden could also extend the ban-or-sale deadline by 90 days.

Before his re-election, Trump said he would not ban TikTok upon his return to the White House, in an attempt to preserve “competition” in a market dominated by Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, which the president-elect has described as an “enemy of the people”.

It is unclear exactly how he could save the app. Experts suggested he could tell Congress to repeal the law, or press the DoJ not to enforce it.

Any move would represent a U-turn from 2020, when then-president Trump issued an executive order to block the app in the US and gave ByteDance 90 days to divest from its American assets and any data that TikTok had collected in the US. That order was blocked by the courts and ultimately revoked by Biden.

Shares in TikTok rivals Meta and Snap, whose revenues have been threatened by the app’s rapid rise in recent years, both rose about 2 per cent on the news.