The rebels are trying to break through a strip of government-controlled territory to reconnect their encircled sector of eastern Aleppo with insurgent territory in the west of Syria, in effect breaking a government siege begun last month.
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Also Monday, six long-range Tu-22M3 bombers took off from Russian territory and carried out strikes on the Islamic State group in areas east and northwest of Palmyra, near Sukhna and Arak, according to a Russian Defense Ministry statement.
Before the war, Aleppo was Syria’s most populous city and home to a rich cultural history.
Those trapped inside the besieged part of the city – which includes up to 90,000 of whom are children, according to the World Health Organization – face a humanitarian crisis, with acute shortages of food and medicine, the United Nations has said.
About 500 fighters from both sides have been killed in the fight in Aleppo, the observatory said.
The push comes after the rebels broke a three-week government siege of Aleppo.
“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.
The semi-official Iranian Fars News Agency said the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah had deployed fighters from its Radwan division to a government-held neighborhood in Aleppo.
The “Army of Conquest”, a coalition of rebels and jihadists including the former Al-Nusra Front, said in a statement it would “double the number of fighters for this next battle”.
Syrian state media, however, deny that the siege has been broken and said the fight was ongoing.
SANA said the militant offensive was preceded by a number of vehicle bombs that struck the area.
The siege imposed on eastern Aleppo in June appears to have compelled rebel groups into an alliance capable of overcoming pro-government forces. For those in the opposition who have always been wary of the extremist group, Fatah Al Sham’s leading role in ending the siege – and even making it look easy in terms of speed – has shown that the rebels need them if they want to succeed on the battlefield.
The rebel offensive moved the battle into dense urban terrain, where airpower is less of an advantage to the regime than in the countryside north of the city.
Overnight, regime forces brought in dozens of trucks carrying food and fuel into the western neighbourhoods via the northern Castello Road, according to the Observatory.
Once Syria’s commercial hub, Aleppo has been transformed into a bombed-out, divided city since fighting first erupted there in 2012.
An AFP journalist in the eastern districts said one truck of vegetables entered on Saturday to be sold in the markets the following day.
Fears are growing in government-held western Aleppo that it might become besieged by rebels, as east Aleppo has been by government forces, because the main route south to Damascus for goods transport, the Ramousah road, has been severed.
More than 700 fighters from both sides were killed in the onslaught, majority rebels because of the regime’s air superiority, it said.
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The Syrian government seized the only route into rebel-held areas in northern Aleppo last month, prompting a rebel counteroffensive from the city’s south.
