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Aleppo, Syria:
Syrian authorities closed Aleppo’s airport and canceled all flights on Saturday, three military sources told Reuters, as rebels opposed to President Bashar al-Assad said they had reached the heart of the city.
Opposition fighters led by the Islamist militant group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham launched surprise clashes in government-held towns this week, reaching Aleppo nearly a decade after being forced out of the northern Syrian city.
Russia, a key ally of Assad, has pledged additional military aid to Damascus to defeat the rebels, two military sources said, adding that new hardware would begin arriving in the next 72 hours.
Rebels began their incursion on Wednesday and by late Friday an operations room representing the offensive said they were sweeping through Aleppo’s neighborhoods.
They are returning to the city for the first time since 2016, when Assad and his allies Russia, Iran and regional Shiite militias retook it, after the rebels agreed to withdraw after months of bombardment and siege.
Mustafa Abdul Jabbar, a commander in the Jaish al-Azza rebel brigade, said the lack of Iranian-backed manpower in the wider Aleppo province this week had helped their rapid advance. The war in Gaza has spilled over into the Middle East as Iran’s allies in the region have suffered constant blows from Israel.
Opposition sources in contact with Turkish intelligence said that Turkey has given the green signal to the offensive.
But Turkish Foreign Ministry spokesman Onko Keseli said Turkey had sought to avoid further instability in the region and warned that recent attacks had undermined de-escalation agreements.
It is the biggest attack since March 2020, when Russia and Turkey agreed to a deal to de-escalate the conflict.
Civilians were killed in the fighting.
On Friday, Syrian state television denied that rebels had entered the city and said Russia was providing air support to the Syrian army.
The Syrian army said it was fighting back the attack and had inflicted heavy losses on rebels in the countryside of Aleppo and Idlib.
David Carden, the UN’s deputy regional humanitarian coordinator for the Syrian crisis, said: “We are very concerned about the situation in north-west Syria.”
“At least 27 civilians, including children as young as 8, have been killed in continuous attacks over the past three days.”
Syrian state news agency SANA said four civilians, including two students, were killed by rebel shelling on a university student dormitory in Aleppo on Friday. It is not clear if they were among the 27 dead reported by the UN official.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Friday that Moscow considers the rebel attack a violation of Syria’s sovereignty.
He said that we are in favor of the Syrian authorities to establish peace in the region and restore constitutional order as soon as possible.
(Other than the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
