Car bombs and rocket fire on Saturday shook Aleppo as rebels battled to break a suffocating siege by the Syrian regime, accused by Washington of using starvation as a “weapon of war.”
The offensive, launched on Friday, aims to break through a three-month encirclement of the battered city’s eastern districts, where more than 250,000 people live without access to food or humanitarian aid.
“In just a few days, we will open the way for our besieged brothers,” rebel commander Abu Mustafa told reporters from the frontline district of Dahiyet al-Assad, on the southwestern outskirts of Aleppo.
Photo: AFP
Fighting and airstrikes pounded nearly all of Aleppo’s western outskirts, with the most intense clashes reported in the districts of al-Zahraa and Dahiyet al-Assad.
Yasser al-Youssef of the Noureddin al-Zinki rebel faction said opposition fighters on Saturday opened a new front in al-Zahraa with a massive car bombing.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group said rebels and allied extremists have unleashed a barrage of rocket fire and at least 10 car bombs since their assault began.
The Britain-based group said two days of fighting has killed at least 30 regime forces and allied fighters as well as 26 Syrian rebels, but it did not give a toll for foreign militants battling alongside the opposition.
At least 21 civilians, including two children, have been killed in rebel bombardment since Friday morning.
Syrian state news agency SANA said rockets fired by opposition groups on Saturday wounded six people including a child in two regime-held districts.
The offensive has seen more than 1,500 rebels from the provinces of Aleppo and nearby Idlib amass along a front stretching 15km down the city’s western edges.
Their aim is to work their way east through a sprawling military complex, then to the district of al-Hamdaniyeh to break through government lines.
Fighting on Saturday was so fierce around al-Zahraa and Dahiyet al-Assad that the explosions and gunfire could be heard across Aleppo’s eastern half, reporters there said.
“There have not been clashes this intense in al-Zahraa since 2012,” when opposition fighters seized Aleppo’s east, observatory head Rami Abdel Rahman said.
He said pro-government forces launched a counterattack and managed to recapture several positions in Dahiyet al-Assad, where rebels had scored a major advance.
An AFP correspondent who visited the district saw deserted streets and extensive damage to buildings battered by airstrikes and artillery fire.
Syria’s second city, Aleppo, has been devastated by some of the heaviest fighting of the country’s five-year civil war that began with anti-government protests and has since killed more than 300,000 people.
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