Regime troops and rebels clashed across Syria on Wednesday, monitors said, as rebel fighters withdrew from the besieged town of Al Haffe after eight days of intense shelling.

Activists said gunfire was reported in the capital’s western suburb of Dumair while regime forces stormed a district of the eastern city of Deir Ezzor.

In Al-Haffe, in Latakia province on the Mediterranean, rebels withdrew in what they described as a tactical move aimed at sparing the lives of local residents under shellfire.

The rebel Free Syrian Army’s (FSA) military council said the wounded were evacuated along with women and children, adding that its fighters retreated “to avoid falling into the regime’s civil war trap.”

State news agency SANA quoted regime officials as saying Al-Haffe was “cleansed” of terrorists.

“The authorities pursued the remaining terrorists in the villages surrounding Al-Haffe” where they “killed and arrested a number of them”, SANA said, adding that government forces also sustained casualties.

Elsewhere, regime forces shelled the central city of Homs and its suburbs, including the rebel bastions of Rastan and Khaldiyeh. They also shelled Houla, site of a massacre in late May of 108 people.

“Regime forces pounded the Homs district of Khaldiyeh all morning,” the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said, adding that two people were killed in Houla overnight.

A local rebel commander in Homs told AFP via Skype his troops were fighting to reclaim the Baba Amr district of Homs that underwent a relentless month-long onslaught by regime forces in March.

“For the first time in months, we fought hard at the entrances to Baba Amr and came very close to reclaiming the district,” said Nasser Nahhar of the FSA. “We would have retaken Baba Amr were it not for the helicopters.”

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton accused Russia on Tuesday of sending attack helicopters to Syria.

“We are concerned about the latest information we have that there are attack helicopters on the way from Russia to Syria, which will escalate the conflict quite dramatically,” Clinton said.

Russia’s arms export agency said its deliveries to Syria were in line with UN regulations but declined to comment specifically on the US claims.

The escalation in violence follows an assessment by UN peacekeeping chief Herve Ladsous on Tuesday that Syria was now in civil war, with regime forces having lost control of “large chunks of territory.”