Syria: Russian strikes hit Aleppo amid rebel takeover

Russian and Syrian jets on Saturday flew bombing raids on a suburb of Syria's second city of Aleppo after jihadi insurgents took control of most of the city in a surprise offensive, a war monitor and military sources have said.

The strikes come as an alliance of rebel factions led by the Islamist militant organization Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) has penetrated far into the city, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

What we know about the fighting

According to a monitor, at least 16 civilians were killed and 20 others wounded when "warplanes, likely Russian, targeted civilian vehicles" at a roundabout in Aleppo.

Syria's military announced on Saturday that it had made a "temporary troop withdrawal" to prepare a counteroffensive and that dozens of soldiers had been killed in fighting in Aleppo and Idlib in the past few days.

A statement said "armed terrorist organizations" had taken over "large parts" of Aleppo.

Meanwhile, a Syria war monitor says insurgents seized Aleppo's civilian airport, the first time they have taken such a facility. 

Militants "took control of the Aleppo international airport" on the city's southeastern outskirts after government forces withdrew, the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said. 

It added that rebels had also advanced in Hama and Idlib provinces, taking control of "dozens of strategic towns without any resistance."

Meanwhile, thousands of civilian cars fled Aleppo hours after insurgents overran key neighborhoods, residents told Reuters news agency. They were mostly heading for Latakia and Salamiya, they said, with the main Damascus-Aleppo highway closed.

Syrian military sources said towns and villages in the surrounding area also came under air attack from Russian and Syrian forces after the rebels carried out their sweep in the region since Wednesday, forcing around 14,000 people to leave their homes, according to the United Nations.

Russian forces have been fighting at the side of troops loyal to Syrian President Bashar Assad since September 2015 in a bid to quell an uprising by an assortment of rebel forces that followed a government crackdown on mostly peaceful pro-democracy protests in 2011.

Significant escalation

The recent eruption of fighting comes after a period in which Syria's civil war was seen to have been widely contained.

Assad, with the help of his allies Russia and Iran, has succeeded in bringing some two-thirds of the country back under government control in the past few years, with Idlib, southwest of Aleppo, remaining as the last rebel stronghold. 

According to Observatory director Rami Abdel Rahman, the rebels took control of most parts of Aleppo without any major resistance on the part of government forces, who have reportedly withdrawn to a suburb. 

"There has been no fighting, not a single shot was fired, as regime forces withdrew," he told the AFP news agency.

The Observatory said 301 people had been killed in the fighting, including 28 civilians.

  

The rebels say the offensive comes in response to recent artillery shelling by government forces targeting civilian areas. 

HTS, considered one of the most powerful armed militias in northwestern Syria, broke off from al-Qaeda's Syria branch in 2017.

It controls large areas of the Idlib region, as well as parts of neighboring Aleppo, Hama and Latakia provinces.

Iran condemns attack on Aleppo consulate

Iran said "terrorist elements" attacked its consulate in Aleppo during a rebel offensive in the area.

In a statement, Esmaeil Baghaei, a spokesperson of the Iranian Foreign Ministry, "strongly condemned the attack" by "some armed terrorist elements" on the Iranian consulate, adding that all its staff members were safe.

 tj/wmr (AFP, Reuters, AP, dpa)