Syrian regime forces were on the defensive around Aleppo on Sunday after a rebel alliance said it inflicted a major setback by breaking a three-week government siege of the battered city.
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The victory has opened a fragile corridor between previously encircled opposition-held territory in the east of the city and the lands controlled by their allies to the west, raising hopes that relief for besieged rebel-held neighborhoods will be on the way.
An AFP correspondent said air raids bombarded rebel-held areas of Aleppo, with the Britain-based Observatory saying the strikes were carried out by Russian and Syrian aircraft.
A Syrian government official is trying to reassure residents of the government-held section of the city of Aleppo that consumer items will still be delivered to them despite a rebel offensive that cut a government route to the city over the weekend.
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.
Advancing through the southwest corner of Aleppo this week, rebels from numerous local factions seized control of military outposts, including the city’s artillery academy.
Late Sunday, the Army of Conquest pledged to “double the number of fighters” to recapture all of Aleppo 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.
Its role in helping liberate the rebel-held side of the city has positioned them as the most effective fighting force against Assad’s troops. Obama’s discredited fraud of a UN Ambassador, regime-change war devotee Samantha Power, has been calling the Syrian government encirclement of al-Qaeda in Aleppo “chilling”, and “an entrapment of 250-300,000 civilians”.
Syrian state news agency SANA says that the rebels have not broken the siege.
The greatest beneficiaries of the rebel victory may be Jabhat Fateh al-Sham, formerly known as Jabhat al-Nusra (al-Nusra Front).
The Syrian government denies the rebels have made any significant breakthrough, and says the siege remains in place.
“Not a single civilian has left the eastern districts because the road is too unsafe and not secured”, he told AFP.
More than 280,000 people have been killed since Syria’s conflict erupted in March 2011 with anti-government protests.
An AFP journalist in eastern Aleppo said residents were on the streets and firing celebratory shots into the air.
The monitor said more than 700 fighters from both sides had been killed in the onslaught, majority rebels because of the regime’s “aerial superiority”.
Nor is the situation better in the eastern part of the city, which has endured heavy aerial bombardment by government warplanes.
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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. Seven trucks of fruits and vegetables entered the eastern rebel-held districts on Sunday and were quickly purchased by residents.
