BEIRUT- Syrian rebels counter-attacked the army and its allies on Friday aiming to break a weeks-long siege on eastern Aleppo, insurgents said.
The assault, employing heavy shelling and suicide car bombs, was mainly focused on the city’s western edge by rebels based in the countryside outside Aleppo.
The offensive prompted the Russian Defence Ministry to ask President Vladimir Putin for permission to resume air strikes against militants in rebel-held eastern Aleppo after 10 days in which the army said it had not struck, Russia’s Interfax news agency reported. But Putin said it was unnecessary to resume strikes yet, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said.
A rebel fighter reacts while riding a military vehicle in Dahiyat al-Assad, west Aleppo city, Syria October 28, 2016.
There were conflicting accounts of advances in areas on the city’s outskirts.
Aleppo, Syria’s biggest pre-war city, has become the main theater of conflict between Bashar al-Assad, backed by Iran, Russia and Shi’ite militias, and rebels including some supported by Turkey, Gulf monarchies and the United States.
Photographs showed insurgents approaching Aleppo in tanks, armored vehicles, bulldozers, make-shift mine sweepers, pick-up trucks and on motorcycles, and showed a large column of smoke rising in the distance after an explosion.
Zakaria Malahifji, an official with Fastaqim, a nationalist rebel group in the offensive, said insurgents had captured the residential area but not the whole of Dahiyet al-Assad. The Observatory said rebels had gained most of the suburb.
REBEL BOMBARDMENT
A senior official in the Levant Front, an FSA group, said: “There is a general call-up for anyone who can bear arms.”
“The preparatory shelling started this morning,” he added.
Abandoned military vehicles are pictured after rebel fighters took control of Dahiyet al-Assad, west Aleppo city, Syria October 29, 2016.
Heavy rebel bombardment, with more than 150 rockets and shells, struck southwestern districts, the Observatory said.
Abu Youssef al-Mouhajir, an official from the powerful Ahrar al-Sham Islamist group, said the extent of cooperation between the different rebel factions was unusual, and that the largest axis of attack was on the western edge of the city.
“This long axis disperses the enemy and it provides us with good cover in the sense that the enemy’s attacks are not focused,” he said.
Mouhajir, the Ahrar al-Sham official, said cloudy weather was helping to reduce the aerial advantage enjoyed by the Syrian military and its Russian allies. Inside Aleppo, tyres were also burnt to create a smokescreen against air strikes.
Grad rockets were launched at Aleppo’s Nairab air base before the assault began said Malahifji of the Fastaqim rebel group, adding that it was going to be “a big battle”.
The Observatory also said that Grad surface-to-surface rockets had struck locations around the Hmeimim air base, near Latakia.
Source: Reuters, 29 Oct. 2016
