Tyler Hicks/The New York Times
ALEPPO, Syria — The sniper walked through the rubble near this city’s front lines. He was searching for another spot from where he might catch a Syrian soldier in his rifle scope’s cross hairs.
Speaking in French-accented English, he said he was not Syrian, but a
roaming jihadist who had journeyed here to help the Sunni uprising
against President Bashar al-Assad’s secular, Alawite rule.
“I am a Muslim,” he said. “When you see on TV many of your brothers and
sisters being killed you have to go help them. This is an obligation in
Islam.”
The presence of this foreign antigovernment fighter, who claimed to be
from Paris and gave his name as Abu Abdullah, pointed to recurring
questions of the battle for Syria’s largest city: How much longer will
the fighting last, and what will its effects be?
Now in its sixth month, the battle for Aleppo has become the contest for
Syria in a microcosm, exposing the weakness of both sides, while
highlighting anew the perils and costs of the country’s bitter civil
war.
It has underlined the rebels’ difficulties in organizing a coherent
campaign; their paucity of infantry weapons heavier than machine guns;
and some of their fighters’ participation in the same human rights
abuses for which they condemn the government, including the summary
killing of prisoners.
It has also left rebels vulnerable to allegations of corruption, including the theft of much needed food and other aid.
Simultaneously, the fighting has exposed the government’s seemingly
fatal miscalculations. For all of its statements to the contrary, and no
matter its effort to mass soldiers and firepower here, Mr. Assad’s
government has mustered neither the popular support nor the military
might to stop the rebels’ slow momentum, much less to defeat them.
These days rumors circulate of Mr. Assad’s dilemma
— will he flee Damascus, Syria’s capital, or die behind the palace
gate? — while it is rebels who speak with confidence.
“Now we are making very good progress,” said Col. Abdul Jabbar
al-Okaidi, a former Syrian military officer who is now one of the senior
rebel commanders in the Aleppo region. “Almost all of the military
bases and regime forces in Aleppo have been surrounded.”
As winter descends, intensifying the humanitarian crisis for Aleppo’s civilians, the battle’s direction has decisively shifted.
The Syrian Army units here have been largely cut off from the capital.
For weeks they have been yielding ground, contracting under the
pressures of persistent rebel attacks from almost every direction and
the related difficulties of resupply.
The military’s tactic of collective punishment — manifested through
seemingly indiscriminate airstrikes and artillery barrages on
residential neighborhoods — has earned it only anger and disgust.
One opposition activist noted the army’s practice of firing a few
artillery rounds into neighborhoods, waiting five or ten minutes for
civilians to gather to help the wounded, and then firing again —
resembling NATO’s practice of repeat airstrikes in its campaign in 2011
to unseat Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi of Libya. “Sometimes we wait and
don’t go out after the first shells, because we know other shells are
coming,” said the activist, Mumtaz Mohammad. “There are a lot of victims
who were killed because of this policy.”
Once able to roam freely in its armored columns, the army begins the
winter confined mostly to the city’s south and west. It also retains
tenuous control of the airport in the southeast, although rebels have
pushed close to its fences and claim to have positioned many
antiaircraft weapons there.
Syrian Air Force support, almost continuous in the city over the summer,
has dwindled. The sound of Russian-made helicopters, once constant, is
now unusual.
Passing attack jets often dispense bright strings of decoy flares — a
sign that pilots fear the rebels’ portable, heat-seeking missiles, used to shoot down at least one aircraft late in the fall.
But these accumulating rebel successes have not come without setbacks,
costs and questions about Syria’s future. The army, while weak, is still
potent and difficult to dislodge where it has concentrated forces in
Aleppo, just as it has done in most of Syria’s cities.
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