Al-Qaeda fighters tighten grip on Syria

A bomb on a bus has killed 14 people in the Syrian province of Homs, as further violence continues across the country.

Fighters allied to Al-Qaeda have tightened their grip on a Syrian border town, as President Bashar al-Assad claimed most of the rebels fighting his forces were linked to the extremist group.

Elsewhere in the country, a bomb attack on a bus in the central province of Homs killed 14 civilians, an NGO said in an updated toll, adding to the more than 110,000 casualties of the 30-month conflict.

Residents said members of Al-Qaeda front group Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) overran the border town of Azaz on Wednesday after an hours-long firefight with Free Syrian Army (FSA) rebels.

Residents reached by Skype said ISIS men controlled all the checkpoints in the town and that FSA fighters appeared to have left.

Meanwhile, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported that rebel fighters from Liwa al-Tawhid, one of Aleppo province's most powerful groups and allied to the FSA, had arrived in the area.

A spokesman for Liwa al-Tawhid told AFP the group "will work to try and calm the situation".

Azaz, on the Turkish border, was one of the first towns to be overrun, in July 2012, by FSA rebels, who set up their own administration.

Assad, in a confident interview with US television network Fox News, insisted Syria was not gripped by civil war but was the victim of infiltration by foreign-backed Al-Qaeda fighters.

"What we have is not civil war. What we have is war. It's a new kind of war," he said, alleging that Islamist guerrillas from more than 80 countries had joined the fight.

"We know that we have tens of thousands of jihadists... we are on the ground, we live in this country."