State troops’ advances collapse rebel defenses
BEIRUT — Simultaneous advances by Syrian government and Kurdishled forces into eastern Aleppo set off a tide of displacement inside the divided city Sunday, with thousands of residents evacuating their premises.
Rebel defenses collapsed as government forces pushed into the city’s Sakhour neighborhood, coming within a half mile of commanding a corridor in eastern Aleppo for the first time since rebels swept into the city in 2012, according to Syrian state media and the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group.
Kurdish-led forces operating autonomously of the rebels and the government, meanwhile, seized the Bustan alBasha neighborhood, allowing thousands of civilians to flee the decimated district to the predominantly Kurdish Sheikh Maqsoud, in the city’s north, according to Ahmad Hiso Araj, an official with the Syrian Democratic Forces.
The government’s push, backed by thousands of Shiite militia fighters from Lebanon, Iraq and Iran, and under the occasional cover of the Russian air force, has laid waste to Aleppo’s eastern neighborhoods.
An estimated quartermillion people are trapped in wretched conditions in the city’s rebelheld eastern districts since the government sealed its siege of the enclave in late August. Food supplies are running perilously low, the U.N. warned Thursday, and a relentless air assault by government forces has damaged or destroyed every hospital in the area.
Residents in east Aleppo said in distressed messages on social media that thousands of people were fleeing to the city’s government-controlled western neighborhoods, away from the government’s merciless assault, or deeper into oppositionheld eastern Aleppo.
The Britain-based Observatory, which monitors the conflict through a network of local contacts, said about 1,700 civilians had escaped to government-controlled areas and another 2,500 to Kurdish authorities.