Syrian regime forces were on the defensive around Aleppo on Sunday, August 7, after a rebel alliance said it inflicted a major setback by breaking a 3-week government siege of the battered city.
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Last month, the forces of Syrian President Bashar Assad imposed a tight siege on rebel-held eastern Aleppo, raising fears of a humanitarian disaster.
Aleppo battle, which is described as “fateful”, is led by Jaish al-Fath, headed by Ahrar al-Sham and Jabhat Fatah al Sham, the former al-Qaeda-linked Nusra Front.
The Syrian government released video showing its planes apparently bombing targets in the south-west of the city.
The war media arm of Lebanon’s Hezbollah, the group fighting alongside the Syrian government, conceded the rebels’ advance, adding that airstrikes leveled one of the military colleges after forces withdrew.
“Despite more than 600 Russian strikes, the regime forces were not able to hold on to their positions”, he said, adding their troops had been redeployed. Such a victory would be a crushing blow to the insurgents.
“We have now seized full control of the Ramousah area.We are in our trenches but there are insane air strikes of unprecedented ferociousness”.
The Syrian military was not immediately available for comment.
They broke through government lines to the south of Aleppo, seizing military colleges, a bakery, a post office, and part of a motorway.
The Fateh al-Sham Front posted photos apparently showing artillery, trucks, armored vehicles, and other weapons in wooden crates. He said some 700 fighters from the government and the insurgent side were killed in the week of fighting.
Syrian state media continued to deny that rebels had taken parts of the road and reported that the air force was intensifying its strikes on “terrorists”, the term it uses to refer to much of the opposition.
Meanwhile, almost all of the strategic northern city of Manbij, in Aleppo province, has been seized by US-backed militias after a more than a two-months’ long offensive against ISIS militants, the observatory and a military official said.
According to the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), the rebels are now pushing northwest towards another military complex in the Hamdaniya neighbourhood.
Although the regime still has access to western Aleppo through the north, the route is not safe enough for civilians trying to escape the fighting to pass, SOHR head Rami Abdurrahman told Reuters.
The Syrian Coalition said demonstrators took to the streets celebrating the lift of the siege.
“After a large-scale military operation carried out in six stages, the Conquest Army managed to put an end to the siege”, Al Jazeera’s Amro Halabi, reporting from the rebel-held half of the city, said.
On Monday, the UN Security Council is due to hold an informal meeting at 1400 GMT on the Aleppo crisis.
“Most recently I’m hearing that the markets are closed and it’s next to impossible to purchase food”, said Christy Delafield, senior communications officer for Mercy Corps.
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The complex, multi-sided civil war in Syria, raging since 2011, has drawn in regional and global powers, caused the world’s worst humanitarian emergency and attracted recruits to Islamist militancy from around the world.
