The Herald Scotland
HEY have become a symbol of a city’s desperation. The “Little Heroes” some call them, while others have referred to them more formally as Aleppo’s “Air Defence Brigades.”
Whatever the title, they are children, mainly boys who daily take to the shell-smashed streets of what was once Syria’s largest city.
Their aim is to create do-it-yourself no-fly-zones, burning car tyres in the hope that the thick black smoke will act as a screen against the Syrian and Russian planes bombing their beleaguered communities.
The 6,000-year-old city of Aleppo, once a crucible of international civilisation is on the edge of the abyss. After five years of fighting, what is unfolding in this former UNESCO World Heritage Site, is being seen as a potentially pivotal moment in this conflict. What happens in Aleppo in the coming weeks might destroy whatever diplomatic hopes remain of a negotiated solution for the war in Syria
It was on July 14 that President Bashar al-Assad’s forces captured the high ground in the city overlooking Castello Road, the last major access route for food and medical supplies into Aleppo.
With this link severed, more than 250,000 civilians remaining out of an original population of some 2.3 million found themselves effectively besieged in the rebel-held eastern part of the city.
Then last Sunday various rebel forces - with the former al-Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra, now called Jabhat Fath al-Sham, in a lead role - launched a coordinated surprise counter-offensive in an attempt to break the siege. Since then they have gained some ground against al-Assad’s forces and his allies.
In an audio address on Aleppo, Jabhat Fatah al-Sham’s leader, Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, urged fighters to remain steadfast, and hinted at the broader significance of the Aleppo campaign.
“This battle’s results exceed simply opening the road for besieged people, but it will overturn the balance of the struggle in the Levant,” he said.
This weekend those same rebel forces are engaged in heavy fighting that has focused on a major army artillery base in the Ramousah quarter in southwestern Aleppo.
The fortress-like base is a little over a mile from the main besieged rebel area and has a huge supply of ammunition used regularly to shell parts of the city held by rebel forces.
Fighters from a coalition of Islamist rebel groups called “Jaish al Fateh” that includes Jabhat Fateh al-Sham, Ahrar al-Sham and other smaller groups said that fighting was still ongoing inside the base.
He described how hundreds of rebel fighters were clashing with government troops only a few hundred yards from each other after breaking through regime defences around the heavily fortified compound.
The Syrian Army, meanwhile, insists the attack on the artillery base and two other major military installations had been foiled, with hundreds of rebels killed and much of their armoured vehicles and tanks destroyed.
It did however admit the assault was the biggest by rebels against government-held areas in the last few years.
“Today there was a large scale attack by the terrorist armed groups and they used all types of weapons, but we are fighting this attack and will defeat them,” Brigadier General Deeb Bazi, the head of one of the targeted bases, told journalists.
Aleppo has been divided between government forces and rebels since the summer of 2012. The city is the last major urban centre held by the mainstream armed opposition in Syria.
If the overall political process in Syria is to amount to anything other than a regime victory in all but name, the rebels have to hold Aleppo city.
For President al-Assad on the other hand, seizing full control of the city would be the biggest victory in five years of fighting and demonstrate the dramatic shift of fortunes in his favour since Russia joined the war on his side last year.
Some analysts in their assessment of the situation have gone as far as to suggest that the course of the entire war is in the balance with the fate of Aleppo.
That must also be on the minds of many armed rebel groups outside of this famous city. Rebel commanders from Latakia, Hama and Idlib have coalesced with those in Aleppo to launch what may be the most substantial opposition operation of the entire conflict, say analysts.
“Personal, political and ideological differences have been shelved in order to prioritise a counter-offensive that within 36 hours looks to have the potential to at least temporarily break the siege of the city,” says Charles Lister, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute.
With that aim in mind the rebel forces have deployed dozens of tanks and armoured vehicles in this latest operation that some Islamist rebel groups have dubbed the “Epic battle of Aleppo”.
Inside the city itself another rebel coalition group the Free Syrian Army (FSA) that includes vetted US-backed fighters among their ranks, have helped pile pressure on the Syrian army and its allies along other frontlines.
Meanwhile, foreign opponents of the al-Assad regime, including Saudi Arabia and Turkey, have been supplying these vetted rebel groups with weapons via a Turkey-based operations centre.
Some of these groups too have received military training overseen by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), making them a regular target of Russian air strikes inside Syria.
As ever in Aleppo this escalation of fighting is taking a terrible toll on a civilian population still trapped within neighbourhoods now little more than canyons of ruins.
Muhammad al-Zein, an administrator who helps oversee hospitals in the rebel-held part of Aleppo, said that airstrikes have hit five hospitals, a clinic, and a medical training institute since pro-Assad forces took control of Castello Road on July 14.
“What is happening is to break the will of the opposition,” said al-Zein. “They are targeting the infrastructure in order to create a feeling of defeat and surrender.”
For five years now the citizens of Aleppo have undergone unimaginable hardships.
Youssef Rahal, a lawyer who left the city 10 days ago but remains in touch with people inside, said there is no way to bring in vegetables or diesel, which rebel-held areas used to buy from the market and transport through the now blockaded Castello Road. This has had a drastic impact on bread production.
“It means some people are getting only a quarter loaf of bread a day,” he said.
With food expected to last just a few more weeks, medical supplies too have all but run out in a city with huge numbers of wounded.
Earlier this year there were said to be only 25 doctors left in the city with the last children’s doctor killed in May. Only the supply of bombs and shells falling on civilians knows no bounds.
In response, civilians have mustered everything at their disposal including the city’s youngsters of the “Air Defence Brigades”.
“It’s causing confusion for the jets and a diversion for the offensive on the ground that aims to break the siege,” says Rami Jarrah, a Syrian political activist and journalist
“Everyone is doing it, but to participate in the resistance this is really the only thing the children can do.”
All of this is aimed at highlighting the increasingly desperate plight of a civilian population who believe the international community has long since abandoned them.
One Syrian man even released a video apologising to environmental groups for the polluting smoke released by burning tyres.
“We are very sorry, please forgive us,” he said. “But you have all turned your backs on the Syrian people. You’ve let us down in not creating a no-fly zone, and this has forced us to do this.”
Laden with an obvious sense of impatience and frustration the man explained that people were burning the tyres to “stop the crimes of the Russians and the al-Assad regime”.
Despite such efforts the onslaught against the city and its people continues, while diplomatic and humanitarian efforts to alleviate the situation continue to face major problems and challenges.
According to the UK-based monitoring group Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), at least 115 civilians, including 35 children, have been killed in the city since rebel fighters began their recent attempt to break the siege.
The deaths include 65 people, among them 22 children, killed in rebel fire on government neighbourhoods, says the SOHR, which gathers information from a network of activists in Syria.
Another 42 people, including 11 children, have been killed in strikes on eastern Aleppo, while five more deaths were reported in rebel fire on the Kurdish-majority Sheikh Maqsud district of the city.
Offers by the Syrian government and Russians to facilitate a humanitarian corridor to allow civilians to flee and rebel soldiers to surrender, ring hollow with many fearing the promise of an escape route is a trap.
One aid worker a few days ago said that barely a few hundred civilians have ventured from their cellars to take up the offer, fearing for their lives at the hands of the Syrian regime’s troops and militias.
Many of those trapped in eastern Aleppo are Sunni Muslims convinced they would bear the brunt of retribution by Syrian Government forces and allies who are mainly Alawite and Shia.
They say the offer presents them with an impossible choice between a slow death if they stay behind and possible detention if they attempt to leave.
“I will not leave. I will be the last man in the city," Mohammed Zein Khandakani, a 28-year-old resident of the Maadi neighbourhood of Aleppo who volunteers with the city's medical council, told journalists.
“I can’t imagine ever seeing a member of this regime one more time.”
But Khandakani, formerly a lawyer who was detained for a month in the early days of the protests against the Syrian government, said that like many men he was worried about his family.
A father of two, the youngest a girl of nine months, he said despite the risk of maltreatment and even arrest, he is urging his mother, wife and sister to use any safe passages to leave the city.
On Friday, United Nations Syrian envoy Staffan de Mistura himself urged Russia to let the UN take charge of humanitarian corridors.
He voiced provisional support for the humanitarian passages proposed by Moscow, but said the UN wanted to see key changes to the plan.
“Our suggestion is to Russia to actually leave the corridors being established at their initiative to us,” de Mistura told reporters in Geneva. “The UN and humanitarian partners know what to do.”
Also on Friday, reports that rebel forces were preventing civilians from leaving areas under their control via regime-provided corridors, only added to the UN’s problems.
“How can you expect people to want to walk through a corridor, thousands of them, while there is shelling, bombing fighting,” de Mistura said.
For now the plight of quarter of a million people still inside Aleppo has reached crunch time. Siege and starvation looms ever more ominously as the battle for Syria’s former economic powerhouse reaches what many see as its endgame.
Short of a significant positive shift on the diplomatic level, allowing for the restoration of a ceasefire and resumption of peace talks, the children of Aleppo’s “Air Defence Brigades,” will continue to run the gauntlet on its shattered streets.
As de Mistura warned on Friday - “the clock is ticking” for the people of Aleppo.