TEL AVIV – While all eyes are set on the battle of Aleppo, there is concern Iran-backed forces could make significant gains in areas close to the Israeli and Jordanian borders, an Arab intelligence official told Breitbart Jerusalem.
Speaking to The Wall Street Journal, a leader of a Syrian rebel umbrella organization expresses optimism towards the incoming Donald Trump administration, hoping that the White House will now assume the “logical role of the U.S. as the defender of democracy.”
President Bashar al-Assad said victory in Aleppo would be a “huge step” towards ending Syria’s five-year civil war, ignoring pleas for a truce as rebels in the city lose more ground.
Syrian government forces control all of Aleppo’s historic Old City after rebel fighters withdrew in the face of army advances overnight, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said on Wednesday.
Russia said Monday it would hold talks with Washington on a total rebel withdrawal from Syria’s Aleppo, where the army has made sweeping advances, but opposition factions rejected any evacuation.
A grim milestone in the siege of Aleppo is reported by Sky News, which writes that “bodies are being left to rot on the streets or buried in backyards” because “there is no room left in the cemeteries.”
The Russian government said on Monday it would start talks with Washington on a rebel withdrawal from Aleppo this week as Russian-backed Syrian forces fought to seize more territory from rebels who are struggling to avoid a major defeat.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on Monday slammed a proposed UN resolution demanding a temporary ceasefire in Aleppo as a “provocative step.”
A man who dressed as a clown to cheer up the children of war-torn Aleppo has reportedly been killed in an airstrike, as the all-out assault by Syrian and Russian forces on rebel-held districts of the city continues.
Syrian troops and allied forces advanced overnight seizing Aleppo’s Tariq al-Bab neighborhood from rebels as they press an offensive to recapture all of the city, a monitor said on Saturday.
Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani on Saturday said Tehran and Moscow would continue to cooperate in the Syrian war “until the ultimate goal of eradicating terrorism and restoring peace and full security to the region is achieved.”
Planes linked to the joint Syrian-Russian offensive have dropped leaflets over areas in rebel-held eastern Aleppo telling the estimated 250,000 residents there, “Everyone has given up on you,” and warning them that they “will be annihilated,” according to Human Rights Watch.
Rebels put up fierce resistance on Friday in a key district of Syria’s battered Aleppo, where a regime offensive has left bodies in the streets and sparked a global outcry.
Rebels in Aleppo have agreed to form a new military alliance to better organize the defense of parts of the city they control from a ferocious assault by the government and its allies, officials in two of the insurgent groups said on Thursday.
The Syrian army’s advance into rebel-held east Aleppo has deprived families of anywhere to hide and left shredded bodies of men, women and children strewn in the streets.
The question of whether Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan discussed his suddenly-announced plans to overthrow the Assad regime with Russian President Vladimir Putin when the two were holding telephone conferences about the Syrian crisis last week appears to have been answered.
Syrian government forces have retaken “full control” of the rebel-held district of Masaken Hanano in northern battlefield city Aleppo, state media said on Saturday.
Syrian government forces advanced quickly inside rebel-held east Aleppo on Monday, as the UN raised the alarm for nearly one million people living under siege in the war-wracked country
The Syrian government on Sunday refused a U.N. proposal to grant the eastern districts of Aleppo autonomy as part of an approach to restore calm to the war-torn city.
Government bombardment of besieged rebel-held neighborhoods in Aleppo killed at least 20 people Saturday, the worst since airstrikes resumed earlier this week, said Syrian opposition activists, as the U.S. called for an end to the bombings.
The Russian-backed Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad reportedly launched a blitz in and around the city of Aleppo this week, bombing hospitals, a blood bank, and areas near schools in the rebel-held territory of the provincial capital and killing at least 87 people, including children.
Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, in an interview published Tuesday, issued his first remarks since the United States elected Donald Trump its next president. Assad told the Portuguese outlet RTP TV Trump’s attitude towards Syria was “promising” and suggesting Trump may be a “natural ally” to Syria, Iran, and Russia.
The residents of Syria’s besieged city of Aleppo received a text Sunday, believed to have come from the dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad, demanding they leave the city or perish when a “strategically planned assault using high precision weapons occurs within 24 hours.”
Syrian insurgents clashed in a town near the Turkish border on Monday as inter-rebel tensions spilled over, playing to President Bashar al-Assad’s advantage with the government tightening its grip on rebel-held eastern Aleppo.
Contents: Britain’s National Health Service (NHS) forced to close emergency rooms; Syrian regime sending ‘leave or die’ text messages to Aleppo residents
Moscow (AFP) – A flotilla of Russian warships is now in the eastern Mediterranean off the Syrian coast after being sent to reinforce Russia’s military in the area, a naval commander said on state television.
Contents: Hundreds of Australian migrants to be resettled in the United States; As winter approaches, Syria’s east Aleppo faces mass starvation
The Russian military said Friday it has evidence of the use of chemical weapons by rebels in Syria’s besieged eastern city of Aleppo.
The Unified Medical Bureau of Eastern Ghouta, an activist organization opposed to the regime of President Bashar Assad, claims that an artillery barrage from government forces struck a nursery in an opposition-controlled suburb of Damascus on Sunday, killing at least six children.
Russia on Monday said its air force was continuing to hold off on strikes against war-ravaged Aleppo, after rebels snubbed Moscow’s offer to quit Syria’s second city.
A U.S.-backed assault on Raqqa, Islamic State’s de facto capital in Syria, is unlikely to pierce the city itself before President Barack Obama leaves office in January, denying him the chance to claim the end of the group’s “caliphate” as part of his legacy.
President Bashar al-Assad claimed Western powers are “becoming much weaker” in Syria, in a confident interview published in The Sunday Times.
As Russia prepares to resume, and probably intensify, its war effort in Syria, human rights groups have increasingly condemned the nation for exacerbating the violence while not taking in Syrian refugees.
Speaking to reporters on Monday, Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad insisted that Syrian society was “much better than before” as far as diversity and inter-ethnic cohesion, according to a New York Times report.
Sheikh Abdullah Almuhessani, the spiritual leader of the jihadists currently fighting to lift the Syrian army’s siege on eastern Aleppo, has released a video in which he encouraged his troops to go on suicide missions.
Russia seeks “honest cooperation” for a political solution in Syria, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Wednesday as Moscow declared a brief truce in the war-ravaged city of Aleppo.
Rebel forces launched a new offensive to break the siege of Aleppo over the weekend, evidently with limited success, as the assault was said to be “slowing” by Monday morning.
Nearly half of Russians fear that Moscow’s bombing campaign in Syria could spark World War III, a poll showed Monday.
Syria’s regime and rebels were locked in fierce clashes Sunday on the western edges of Aleppo, where 38 civilians have been killed in two days of opposition rocket fire, a monitor said.
Rebel factions, backed by the former al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria, have reportedly launched a major offensive to break the siege east of Syria’s Aleppo city by forces loyal to the Russian- and Iranian-backed Syrian Dictator Bashar al-Assad.
