The allies that helped Assad take Aleppo

BEIRUT (Reuters) – When rebel fighters launched a last desperate attempt to break the siege of Aleppo in October, they were beaten back - not by the Syrian Army but by the Lebanese Shi’ite group Hezbollah fighting on its behalf, a senior official in the pro-government alliance said.

In the build-up to the final battle for Syria’s second city, scores of fighters from a single Iraqi Shi’ite militia were killed in just two days of combat this summer, said a commander of another group fighting for President Bashar Assad.

Even in the last hours of fighting in Aleppo, allied Iraqi militia were at the vanguard. The UN human rights office said it had reports that the Syrian Army and an allied Iraqi militia had killed at least 82 civilians in captured city districts – allegations denied by the army and militia in question.

These episodes show how in the decisive battle of Syria’s nearly six-year-old civil war, Assad drew heavily on foreign Shi’ite militias sponsored by Iran for his most important victory to date.

Rebel sources say that among fighters taken prisoner by insurgents in the last months of Assad’s campaign to retake Aleppo, there was not a single Syrian soldier.

To be sure, Russian air strikes were the most important factor in Assad’s triumph. They enabled his forces to press the siege of rebel-held eastern Aleppo to devastating effect and regain full control of what was Syria’s biggest city and economic hub before the war.

But on the ground, Shi’ite militias from as far afield as Afghanistan played an important role for Assad, a member of the minority Alawite sect which is an offshoot of Shi’ite Islam.

Among these militias, which fought in and around Aleppo alongside the Tiger Force, an elite Syrian army unit lavishly backed by Russia, was the Ansar Allah al-Awfiya group.

The rebels inflicted big losses on the militia’s fighters by hitting them with a barrage of guided anti-tank missiles as they retreated in an area outside Aleppo, according to the militia commander, also an Iraqi. Reuters was unable to confirm the account with the group itself.

But Hezbollah, battle-hardened by years of conflict with Israel, played an even more important role. It ensured the siege was not broken by helping thwart a series of suicide attacks, according to the official in the pro-Assad military alliance.

“If they [the suicide attacks] had succeeded we would have been the ones under siege,” he said.

Hezbollah fighters have been in Syria since the early days of the civil war, which grew out of protests against Assad and his government in 2011. Their role in the battle of Qusair in Homs province in 2013 was critical to stopping rebels splitting the Assad-held west in two.

Other Shi’ite militia groups arrived steadily, their level of organization growing under Iranian leadership.

The Iraqi commander described foreign fighters as the “weight” behind the pro-government forces.

“The Iranians manage all the factions, but Hezbollah is independent,” he said.