Rebels Control Most of Syrias Largest City, War Monitor Says
Antigovernment rebels captured most of Syria’s largest city, Aleppo, by early Saturday, facing little resistance from government forces on the ground there, according to the fighters and to a war monitoring group.Syrian government warplanes responded with airstrikes on Aleppo neighborhoods for the first time since 2016, according to the war monitoring group, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.That year, rebels were routed from Aleppo in a fierce battle for the city that dragged on for months, a big blow to the opposition movement trying to oust the autocratic president, Bashar al-Assad.Allied Russian forces also carried out airstrikes on Friday on opposition-held areas of two provinces, Aleppo and Idlib, according to the observatory.
But it was not immediately clear whether Russia also carried out airstrikes on the city of Aleppo, capital of the Aleppo province.The rapid advance on Aleppo came just four days into a surprise rebel offensive launched on Wednesday.It is both the most serious challenge to Mr.
al-Assad’s regime and the most intense escalation in years in a long civil war that had been mostly dormant.The Aleppo governor, police and security commanders, and other regime forces have fled the Aleppo city center, the observatory said on Saturday.Rebels and some former residents of Aleppo who have just returned to the city shared with reporters and on social media images and videos said to be of themselves in front of well-known Aleppo landmarks.One was an ancient citadel that once served as a military outpost for Mr.
al-Assad’s forces at the height of battles for the city years ago.Residents of Aleppo described to The New York Times how control of their city seemingly switched between night and day.Syrian state media challenged the reports of a rebel takeover of most of Aleppo, saying that the Syrian military had captured groups of “terrorists” who had been filming inside several neighborhoods to try to prove they had taken control of them....