Syrian rebel groups herald military alliance
Improved co-ordination in battle against Assad
ALEPPO, SYRIA — Rebels have taken a major stride in uniting their ranks in the battle for Syria’s largest city, giving them hope they could tip the balance after three months of bloody, stalemated combat in Aleppo, one of the biggest prizes of the civil war.
The question is how much more destruction the city can bear.
Government troops are retaliating against more effective rebel attacks with increasingly devastating bombardment, and civilians are bearing the brunt, with their neighbourhoods left in ruins.
The new military council was announced Sept. 9. It brings together two of the biggest rebel players in Aleppo and the countryside, and should allow for better co-ordinated attacks against the 30 per cent of the city still in regime hands.
The rebels have long been hampered by their division into dozens of competing groups, some with better links to funding and weapons, while others have more manpower. There has been little coherent strategy, and organizing a major assault can often involve negotiations among dozens of independent outfits.
“Before we made this council, the military aid used to come to just one man, and the people on the ground would get nothing. By forming this council, now aid comes to everyone,” said Abdel Aziz Salameh, a former honey trader, based in the town of Tel Rifaat. He runs the biggest network of fighters in the province and is part of the Tawhid Division.
He described how assaults often had to be called off when his men ran out of ammunition after days of hard fighting and had to regroup and scrounge for more.
No rebel group admits to getting weapons or ammunition from abroad. They say instead they get funds from Syrians abroad and use it to buy weapons from smugglers.
Regime airstrikes hit a gas station in northern Syria Thursday, setting off a fiery explosion that killed at least 30 people and wounded dozens, opposition activists said. Amateur video showed thick black smoke engulfing the scene.
Salameh’s one-time rival is Colonel Abdel Jabbar Aqidi, a recently defected officer from Assad’s military and the official representative of the Free Syrian Army. He received the lion’s share of the funding from Syrians abroad, but did not have the manpower to take advantage of it.
“There were differences among the organizations and now we are united in our structure to improve our fighting,” he told the Associated Press from the basement of his villa set among olive groves in a village north of Aleppo. “Unity and co-ordination make us more effective in the revolution.”
The rebel assault on Aleppo, a city of about three million, began in July after the government crushed a similar attack on the capital Da- mascus. In this case, however, the forces were more evenly matched and to the surprise of many, the outgunned rebels not only held on but expanded their hold on the city in fierce urban combat.
The rebels’s successes have as much to do with their tenacity as the state of the Syrian army in Aleppo.
“Significant weaknesses among the Syrian armed forces have been the primary factor behind the deadlock in Aleppo,” said Torbjorn Soltvedlt, a senior analyst with the Britain-based Maplecroft risk analysis group, explaining the bulk of the regime’s troops were based around Damascus. Other units are constantly in danger of hemorrhaging men through defections.
“The regime has been unable to use the main highway between Damascus in the south and Aleppo in the north to reinforce and supply its forces,” he said, because of rebel control of the city of Rastan, on the highway, and parts of the Idlib province countryside around it.
The Syrian army, whose raison d’être until recently was a full scale tank war with Israel, is also not accustomed to counter-insurgency tactics in urban environments — something the rebels appear to have adapted to quite quickly.