Syria Democratic Forces (SDF) fighters inspect a dead body of what they said was an Islamic State fighter inside a shop in Manbij, in Aleppo Governorate, Syria, August 7, 2016. Those reports include one of an air strike near a hospital in northwestern Syria on Saturday that killed 10 people including children, and caused damage to the hospital facility.
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“We once again urge Russian Federation to stop facilitating these sieges and to use its influence to press the regime to end its sieges across Syria once and for all”, she said. Government areas frequently come under attack from rebel shelling, and rebel-held areas are routinely shelled and come under air attack from Syrian and allied Russian forces.
A coalition of rebels and militants surged through regime territory to open a new route into Aleppo’s besieged eastern neighbourhoods, home to about 250,000 people.
Jaysh al Fateh – the rebel alliance comprised of Islamist groups as well as so-called moderates – released a statement Sunday declaring that its fighters would continue battling to capture the entire city, and vowing to protect residents.
The greatest beneficiaries of the rebel victory may be Jabhat Fateh al-Sham, formerly known as Jabhat al-Nusra (al-Nusra Front).
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 of Aleppo is a rather decisive one, as observers declared that whoever controls Aleppo will gain the upper hand in any potential settlement in Syria.
Rebels cut the main route into government-held Aleppo on Sunday, just days after the rebels broke the government’s siege of their own stronghold in the east of the city.
In May, President Bashar al Assad likened the fight for Aleppo to the battle of Stalingrad.
Fighting on the southern edges of Aleppo continued into Sunday morning, hours after rebels said they had broken a three-week government siege of the Syrian city. “But regime-held western Aleppo, for example, now has to be supplied via contested “war roads” – improvised roads on which it might not be possible to sustain the swollen population of these western neighborhoods”.
But little has changed for the besieged residents of rebel-held eastern Aleppo neighborhoods, who have been enduring acute shortages of food and medicine, as the fighting remains too fierce for aid to be delivered, the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights and humanitarian workers operating in the area say.
Mohammed Khandakani, a resident of opposition-held Aleppo who accompanied the fighters to the frontline Saturday, said heavy bombing on the aeronautics school resulted in massive explosions.
An AFP photographer said the first truck of vegetables in a month entered eastern Aleppo via Ramussa on Saturday.
The U.N. says there are about 18 besieged and hard-to-reach areas, nearly all encircled by government forces.
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As the veteran NATO Military Committee Chairman Gen. Harald Kujat (German Bundeswehr, ret.) warned on Deutschlandfunk radio recently, anyone talking about defending “rebels” fighting the al-Assad government in Aleppo, is talking about supporting al-Qaeda, al-Nusra, and ISIS.
