Aleppo: Syrian army tanks shelled Aleppo on Sunday and a helicopter gunship strafed rebel positions with heavy machinegun fire as they fought for control of the country’s biggest city and key battleground of the 17-month uprising.
After UN Security Council paralysis on Syria forced peace envoy Kofi Annan to resign last week, and with his ceasefire plan a distant memory, rebels have been battered by the government onslaught in Aleppo and the capital Damascus.
A Reuters correspondent in Aleppo witnessed fierce street fighting in the Salah Al Deen district, a gateway into the city of 2.5 million people.
Tanks pounded alleyways where rebels sought cover and one shell hit a building next to the reporter, pouring rubble onto the street and sending huge billows of smoke into the sky.
State television said Bashar Al Assad’s forces were “cleansing the terrorist filth” from the country, which has been sucked into an increasingly sectarian conflict that has killed some 18,000 people and could spill into neighbouring states.
In Damascus, jets bombarded the capital on Saturday as troops kept up an offensive they began a day earlier against the last rebel bastion there, a resident said.
Both cities — vital prizes in the battle for Syria — were relatively free of violence in the early months of the uprising but fighting flared in Damascus shortly before a July 18 bomb killed four of Assad’s inner circle. It later erupted in Aleppo.
On Saturday, a rebel commander in Aleppo said he expected a Syrian army attack on rebels “within days”, echoing the head of the UN peacekeeping department who said there had been a “considerable build-up of military means”.
“We know they are planning to attack the city using tanks and aircraft, shooting at us for three to four days and they plan to take the city,” Colonel Abdul Jabbar Al Oqaidi said.
SHOPPING DISTRICT IN RUINS
Once a busy shopping and restaurant district where residents would spend evenings with their families, Aleppo’s Salah Al Deen district is now white with dust, broken concrete and rubble.
Tank shell holes gape wide on the top of buildings near the front line, and homes of families and couples have been turned into look outs and sniper locations for rebel fighters.
Large mounds of concrete are used as barriers to close off streets, the whiff of weapon fire and rotting garbage intermix. Lamp posts lie horizontally across the streets after being downed by shelling, their wiring swinging idly in the wind.
Civilians trickle back to collect their belongings and check on their homes. Late on Saturday a confused elderly man stumbled into 15th street as rebels exchanged fire with the army.
“Get out of the way! Get off the street!” fighters shouted, grabbing him and taking him to shelter from sniper fire.
“I just wanted to buy some blackberry juice,” he told the fighters, his face reflecting confusion and horror at the damage to his street. Instinctively, he took his personal ID out of his chest pocket to show the rebels, a habit from the strict days of the Al Assad security officials.
During the day, others emerged from damaged buildings.
A couple stood shaking with fear at an intersection a few metres from the fighting, as a medic waved a car down to help take them to safety.
“Just to hold power he is willing to destroy our streets, our homes, kill our sons,” wept Fawzia Umm Ahmad, referring to Al Assad’s determined counter-offensive against the rebels.
“I can’t recognise these streets any more.”
REBEL WEAPONS
Rebels tried to extend their area of control in Aleppo from Salah Al Deen to the area around the television and radio station on Saturday, but were pushed back, an activist said.
Syrian television said a large number of “terrorists” were killed and wounded after they tried to storm the broadcaster.
Outgunned by Al Assad’s forces, the rebels are constantly on the hunt for captured weapons.
On one Salah Al Deen street, a rebel fighter drove up in a pick-up truck mounted with an anti-aircraft weapon, one of 15 that rebels said were seized during fighting last week.
But the weapon could not be aimed at the sky and neither did it fire. It remained parked on a side street.
“We only have 200 rounds per weapon,” said Abu Furat Al Garabolsi, an army officer who defected. “We have to be totally sure we will shoot a plane when we fire it otherwise we won’t be able to replenish what we have used.”
After Annan’s resignation, the UN General Assembly voted on Friday to condemn the Syrian government and criticise the UN Security Council’s failure to agree tougher action, in a resolution that Western diplomats said highlighted the isolation of Assad supporters Russia and China.
Russia called the vote a “facade of humanitarian rhetoric” behind which Al Assad’s foreign enemies were arming the rebels and worsening the violence that has elements of a proxy war between Sunni and Shiite Islam which could spill beyond Syrian borders.
Al Assad is a member of the Alawite faith, an offshoot of Shiite Islam that has dominated Syrian politics through more than 40 years of his family’s rule in a country that has a Sunni Muslim majority.
The mostly Sunni Muslim Gulf Arab states and Turkey have called for Al Assad to go. Al Assad still has the backing of Shiite Iran and Lebanon’s armed Shiite Hezbollah movement.
On Sunday Syrian rebels claimed responsibility for kidnapping 48 Iranian pilgrims in Syria and said they were checking their identities to show that Tehran was involved in fighting for Al Assad, a rebel officer said.
The interview was aired after the Dubai-based Al Arabiya television broadcast a video showing armed men checking the identity cards of the kidnapped Iranians.
The fighters were “still checking the documents that prove the identity of these detainees and will make our findings public in due course,” said a man identified as Captain Abdul Nasser Al Shumair, commander of the Al Baraa brigade of the Free Syrian Army. He said his men had been tracking the abducted Iranians for two months before they were seized.
Tehran has asked Turkey and Qatar to help secure the release of kidnapped men, Iran’s state news agency IRNA said.
