BEIRUT- Syrian rebels stormed a major army artillery base in the northern city of Aleppo on Friday to try an end the siege of opposition-held areas.
A quarter of a million civilians still live in Aleppo’s opposition-controlled eastern neighborhoods, effectively under siege since the army, aided by Iranian-backed militias, cut off the last road into rebel districts in early July.
Fighters from a coalition of Islamist rebel groups and other smaller groups, said they had taken the main fortress-like artillery academy in the Ramousah quarter in southwestern Aleppo.
They were now fighting to take the other military academies adjoining the artillery base that are among the country’s largest.

A Syrian rebel fighter drives an armoured vehicle in Aleppo, northern Syria.

The artillery base is almost 2 km from the besieged opposition area. It has a huge supply of ammunition and is used regularly to shell parts of the city held by opposition forces.
The rebels are trying to break through a strip of government-controlled territory to reconnect their encircled sector of eastern Aleppo with a swathe of insurgent territory in the west of Syria, effectively breaking the siege.
The fall of that strip would also cut off western Aleppo, which is in government hands.
Hundreds of fighters were clashing with government troops only a few hundred meters from each other in parts of the artillery base after breaking into government defenses around the heavily fortified compound, rebels said.
Aleppo, Syria’s biggest city before the outbreak of the civil war five years ago, has been divided between government forces and rebels since the summer of 2012.
Rebels have poured in thousands of fighters mainly from the rebel-held province of Idlib in north western Syria and deployed dozens of tanks and armored vehicles in the operation that was named the “Epic battle of Aleppo.”
Inside the city, Free Syrian Army (FSA), among them vetted US-backed groups, helped pile pressure on the army and its allies along other front lines.
Foreign opponents of Assad including Saudi Arabia and Turkey have been supplying vetted rebel groups with weapons via a Turkey-based operations center.
Some of these groups have received military training overseen by the US Central Intelligence Agency. The vetted groups have been a regular target of the Russian air strikes.
Lebanese Hezbollah group that fights alongside Assad’s government forces is an ally of Iranian-backed militias and the Russians in trying to help Assad regain control of the opposition-held parts of Aleppo.
The deputy head of the Lebanese group, Sheikh Naim Qassem, said in an interview with Reuters this week he saw no immediate end to the war in Syria.
Rebels said jets flying at high altitude, believed to be Russian, intensified their strikes on the area but were unable to hold back rebel advances because of the terrain.
Both Moscow and its Syrian and Iranian allies see the outcome of the battle over Aleppo as decisive, counting on a crushing blow to insurgents who were on the march until Russia intervened, shoring up Assad’s rule.
The complex, multi-sided civil war in Syria, raging since 2011, has drawn in most regional and global powers, caused the world’s worst humanitarian emergency and attracted recruits to Islamist militancy from around the world.

Source: Reuters, 6 August 2016