Reuters - Syrian rebels
including jihadists 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. It
included Jabhat Fateh al-Sham, a former affiliate of al Qaeda previously known
as the Nusra Front, and groups fighting under the Free Syrian Army (FSA)
banner.
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.
The Syrian
Observatory for Human Rights, a British-based war monitor, said more than 15
civilians had been killed and 100 wounded by rebel shelling of government-held
western Aleppo. State media reported that seven civilians were killed.
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 President
Bashar al-Assad, backed by Iran, Russia and Shi'ite militias, and Sunni rebels
including some supported by Turkey, Gulf monarchies and the United States.
The city has been
divided for years between the government-held western sector and rebel-held
east, which the army and its allies put under siege this summer and where they
launched a new offensive in September that medics say has killed hundreds.
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.
Fateh al-Sham said
in a statement that rebels had gained control over Dahiyet al-Assad, a suburb
with a low-rise residential district of about a square kilometer on the
southwest corner of the city.
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.
But a Syrian
military source said earlier that the army and its allies had thwarted what he
called "an extensive attack" on south and west Aleppo. A state
television station reported that the army had destroyed four car bombs.
REBEL BOMBARDMENT
Abu Anas al-Shami, a
member of the Fateh al-Sham media office, told Reuters from Syria the group had
carried out two "martyrdom operations", after which its fighters had
gone in and had been able to "liberate a number of important areas".
A third such attack had been carried out by another Islamist group.
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.
Heavy rebel
bombardment, with more than 150 rockets and shells, struck southwestern districts,
the Observatory said.
Fateh al-Sham played
a big part in a rebel attack in July that managed to break the government siege
on eastern Aleppo for several weeks before it was reimposed.
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.
JIHADISTS
The powerful role
played by Jabhat Fateh al-Sham, listed by many countries as a terrorist group,
has complicated Western policy toward supporting the anti-Assad opposition.
The United States
has prevented more powerful weapons such as anti-aircraft missiles from being
supplied to rebels partly out of fear they could end up in jihadist hands.
The Syrian military
source said Friday's attack had been launched in coordination with Islamic
State, a group against which all the other rebels, including Fateh al-Sham,
have fought.
Islamic State
fighters did clash with the Syrian army on Friday at a government-held airbase
37km (23 miles) east of Aleppo, next to territory the jihadist group already
controls, the Observatory reported.
Syria's civil war,
now in its sixth year, has killed hundreds of thousands of people, displaced
half the country's pre-war population, dragged in regional and global powers
and caused a refugee crisis in the Middle East and Europe.
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.
Eruters
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