1 week Ago By The Telegraph
Syrian rebels captured Aleppo’s airport and a majority of the city that has stunned Bashar al-Assad’s regime. Fighters in the west, captured the airport in the east and also appeared in photographs outside the medieval citadel in the centre of Syria’s second city. The Syrian army on Saturday admitted that rebels had entered large parts of the city and said regime forces had staged a temporary withdrawal to prepare a counter-offensive.
The withdrawal was part of a regrouping effort ahead of the arrival of reinforcements to launch the counter-attack, it claimed. Dozens of soldiers had been killed or injured in fierce battles with insurgents in Aleppo and Idlib over the past few days, the military said. Video showed fighters patrolling around the airport on Saturday morning, after the regime had halted flights on Friday as the offensive reached the city.
BREAKING: The Syrian Democratic Forces ( ) have taken International Airport. The so-far neutral SDF has started moving out of the territory in , securing strategic locations as the regime seems to have collapsed all over northern Syria. — Thomas van Linge (@ThomasVLinge) Fighters led by the jihadist group seized swathes of the city on Friday against almost no resistance as Syrian army forces melted away, monitors said.
Rami Abdel Rahman, director of the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, told AFP that HTS and its allies “took control of most of the city and government centres and prisons”. The was on Saturday rapidly trying to reinforce its remaining areas of control, while Russian aircraft launched air strikes to try to beat the rebels back. The offensive marks the most significant challenge in years to Assad, reigniting the front lines of the Syrian civil war that have largely been frozen since 2020.
Rebel groups were ousted from Aleppo in 2016 with the help of and Iranian forces, after a brutal four-year siege. Aleppo has not been attacked by opposition forces since they were last ousted from eastern neighbourhoods in 2016, following a gruelling military campaign in which Syrian government forces were backed by Inside Aleppo, schools and government offices were closed as most people stayed indoors, according to Sham FM radio, a pro-government station. Bakeries reportedly remained open.
Social media posts purported to place the rebels outside the city’s citadel, and cellphone videos showed them visiting residents in their homes, seeking to State media said reinforcements, as well as Russian arms and equipment, were on their way to repel the “terrorists”. The HTS group, which had its roots in the before turning on the extremists, said it had launched the assault in response to weeks of regime attacks on the rebel-held enclave in north-western Syria. Turkey, which has backed Syrian opposition groups, failed in its diplomatic efforts to prevent the government attacks, which were seen as a violation of a 2019 agreement sponsored by Russia, Turkey and Iran to freeze the line of the conflict.
Turkish security officials said the rebels had originally intended a “limited” offensive toward Aleppo, from where attacks targeting civilians originated. However, the offensive expanded as Syrian government forces began retreating from their positions, the officials said..
