Reports: Syria Rebels Capture Pilot of Downed Warplane

Syrian rebels captured a pilot manning a regime fighter jet downed on Wednesday over Daret Ezza in the northern province of Aleppo, witnesses said.

"Two pilots used parachutes to jump out of the plane after it was hit," a witness told an AFP reporter in the town. "One of them was taken prisoner."

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based watchdog, also said that the rebels had captured one of the pilots.

"A Syrian fighter jet pilot was taken prisoner in Daret Ezza after his plane was downed," said the Observatory, which relies on a network of activists and medics on the ground.

Amateur video shot by activists and posted on YouTube showed clouds of fire and smoke rising from a mass of broken metal parts strewn across a green field.

"This is your airplane, O Bashar," an unidentified man said from behind the camera, in reference to Syria's President Bashar Assad.

"The (rebel) Free Syrian Army has downed it," added the man.

A second amateur video distributed by the Observatory showed a group of men carrying a uniformed man identified as a pilot.

"We want him alive," one man can be heard saying in the video.

"This is the man who was piloting the plane that bombarded the houses of civilians," said another.

The second pilot's whereabouts was not immediately known.

This development came a day after rebels downed an army helicopter for the first time with a newly acquired ground-to-air missile, in what the Observatory said had the potential to change the balance of military power in the conflict.

The gunship was on a strafing run near the besieged northwestern base of Sheikh Suleiman, the last garrison in government hands between Syria's second city and the Turkish border.

Little more than a week ago, the rebels seized tanks, armored vehicles, artillery, 120-mm mortars and rocket launchers when they took the government forces' sprawling Base 46, about 12 kilometers (eight miles) west of Aleppo.

The rebels, a mix of military defectors and armed civilians, are vastly outgunned but analysts say they are now stretching thin the capabilities of Assad's war machine and its air supremacy by opening multiple fronts.

This was evident again on Wednesday when regime warplanes carried out five raids in 15 minutes on Maaret al-Numan, a rebel-held town on the strategic Damascus-Aleppo highway.

Fighter jets also bombarded anti-regime town Daraya southwest of Damascus and the besieged, rebel-held neighborhood of Khaldiyeh in the central city of Homs, dubbed by activists as "the capital of the revolution".