BEIRUT // Car bombs and rocket fire shook Aleppo on Saturday 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,” said rebel commander Abu Mustafa from the front line district of Dahiyet Al Assad, on the south-western outskirts of Aleppo.
Fighting and air strikes 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 Nureddine Al Zinki rebel faction said opposition fighters opened a new front in Al Zahraa on Saturday with a massive car bombing.
The new offensive by the rebels is the second attempt to break the government’s siege of Aleppo’s eastern districts, where the UN estimates 275,000 people are trapped.
Syrian government forces launched a counteroffensive on Saturday under the cover of air strikes in an attempt to regain control of areas they had lost, but rebels hit back with a barrage of rocket fire and extremist groups exploded at least 10 car bombs. The British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which monitors the war through a network of on-the-ground sources, said two days of fighting had killed at least 20 fighters from either the Syrian army or its allies as well as 26 Syrian rebels and 21 civilians, including two children..
More than 1,500 rebels from the provinces of Aleppo and nearby Idlib are now massed along a front stretching for 15 kilometres 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, said Abu Mustafa.
Fighting on Saturday was so fierce around Al Zahraa and Dahiyet Al Assad that the explosions and gunfire could be heard across the eastern half of Aleppo.
After holding off air strikes for 10 days, the Russians say they requested permission to resume them but this was denied by president Vladimir Putin. The president’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Mr Putin deemed it more important to “continue the humanitarian pause”.
Yet no aid has entered Aleppo and only a handful of people have left the city via so-called safe corridors and Washington has accused Moscow of using starvation as a weapon of war, which is a war crime under the Geneva Convention.
A coalition of Iranian-backed Iraqi Shiite militia on Saturday announced plans to cross the border into Syria to fight alongside president Bashar Al Assad’s forces after “clearing” ISIL militants from Iraq.
“After clearing all our land from these terrorist gangs, we are fully ready to go to any place that contains a threat to Iraqi national security,” said Ahmed Al Asadi, a spokesman for the militia coalition.
* Agence France-Presse
