Bad weather halts Aleppo air strikes but fighting continues

Thick cloud cover and rain deterred air strikes on rebel-held districts of east Aleppo on Thursday, though artillery bombardment and heavy fighting continued on the ground, a monitor and civil defence workers said.

Rebel groups are trying to prevent further gains by government forces that have seized more than a third of territory held by the opposition in Aleppo city in recent days.

The Syrian army and pro-government militias clashed with rebels along the edges of the shrinking opposition-held enclave, particularly in the Sheikh Saeed district in the south and in the east of city near the airport, it said.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a British-based war monitor, said the weather impeded aerial bombardment of rebel-held areas on Thursday, but artillery shelling continued.

In the last few days, before the bad weather, Syrian government jets had struck several east Aleppo districts, the observatory, rebels and residents reported.

"Praise God, there are no warplanes," Ibrahim Abu al-Laith, a civil defence official in opposition-held Aleppo, said on Thursday. The civil defence is a rescue service that operates in rebel-held areas of Syria.

A few people were burning their belongings or furniture to warm themselves, he added. “The situation of the displaced is very bad,” he said. “There are no shelters for them, no fuel, no firewood. Many people are sleeping in the streets.”

Thousands of people have fled deeper into the rebel-held sector in recent days, as the government and its allies press on with a ferocious offensive aimed at taking the whole city.

“Many of the families that were displaced within besieged Aleppo are living in houses that don’t even have doors,” said Bebars Mishal, a civil defence rescue worker in the area.

Aleppo has for years been divided between the government-held west and rebel-held eastern zone, which the army and allied forces besieged in the summer and where they have made a sweeping advance.

New alliance

Artillery by government forces and air strikes killed more than 300 people in rebel-held east Aleppo in the past two weeks, the observatory said. Rebel shelling of government-held western districts had meanwhile killed 48 people, it said.

The biting cold and rain did not stop the fighting along multiple frontlines on Thursday, the observatory said.

In a separate development, rebels in Aleppo have agreed to form a new military alliance to better organise the defence 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 government assault backed by allied militia has driven the rebels from more than a third of the territory they held in eastern Aleppo, threatening to crush the rebellion in its most important urban stronghold.

Rivalry among rebel groups has been seen as one of their major flaws throughout the war.

The two officials, speaking from Turkey, said the new alliance would be called the "Aleppo Army" and led by the commander of the Jabha Shamiya rebel faction, one of the major groups fighting in northern Syria under the Free Syrian Army banner.

An official with a second rebel group confirmed that the Jabha Shamiya's Abu Abdelrahman Nour had been selected as the leader. In an interview with Reuters last week, Mr Nour urged greater support from foreign states that back the opposition.

A Jabha Shamiya official said the new alliance would help centralise decision-making.

The Jabha Shamiya group, known in English as the Levant Front, has received support from Turkey and other states that want Syria‘s President Bashar al-Assad removed from power.

Reuters