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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State media denied that the siege had been broken and that its own forces were surrounded, saying the battle for Syria’s second city was ongoing.
A Syrian rebel alliance has announced the start of a battle to recapture the whole of Aleppo, a day after it broke a government siege on the rebel-held half of the city.
A rebel commander said opposition forces were able to capture the Armament School after they detonated five vehicle bombs that resulted in the “total collapse” of the defenses of government troops there.
The Observatory said that although the militants outside the city did reach rebel-held neighborhoods of eastern Aleppo, civilians still don’t have a safe route to leave because of intense airstrikes and shelling in the area.
Fierce fighting – some of the most ferocious in the conflict’s five-year history – has raged around the southwestern Aleppo, particularly around the strategically crucial Al Ramouseh neighborhood, as the rebels launched a concerted push to break the siege and allow for the resupply of the encircled enclave.
That rebel advance severed the primary government supply corridor running into the city from the south, and raised the prospect that government-held western Aleppo might in turn become besieged by the insurgents.
The Syrian army engaged Jaish al-Fatah, a coalition controlling Idlib province west of Aleppo, on the south-western outskirts of the city, while other insurgent fighters exerted pressure from within.
Syrian rebel forces entered eastern Aleppo after fighting to break through government held areas separating part of the city from their western operations.
Rebels posted footage of their fighters embracing and celebrating the end of the government encirclement, in place since July 17.
“The regime is using cluster and vacuum bombs”, said Abu al Hasanien, a senior commander in Fateh Halab, the coalition of moderate rebel groups inside the city.
Syria’s pro-government Al-Watan newspaper also said Monday that the Syrian army and its allies had brought “necessary” military reinforcements to recover areas it withdrew from after it carried out a “redeployment in the area”.
The battle for Aleppo, Syria’s second biggest city, has raged since mid-2012 and is among the fiercest in the multi-front war that has killed almost 400,000 people, according to an estimate by the UN’s chief mediator. Only a narrow strip of territory connects these troops to their main supply lines. A source in Damascus confirmed that the road to western Aleppo was closed.
Some rebel groups refer to the Aleppo battle as the “Ibrahim al-Youssef Offensive”, a reference to a Sunni army officer said to have led a massacre of cadets at the Artillery College in the late 1970s.
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Pope Francis continued his press for peace in Syria on Sunday, using his traditional noontime Angelus address to say it’s “unacceptable that so many unarmed persons, including many children, have to pay the price of the conflict”.
