BEIRUT, Lebanon — The battle for Aleppo — Syria’s most populous city — is once again raging, once again trapping hundreds of thousands of civilians, once again rallying fighters seeking an advantage in the five-year-old civil war.
But it is just as likely that Aleppo will continue to burn, the war will move no closer to resolution — and many people will continue to suffer and die.
“Every day we have wounded, every day we have sick people,” Abdulqader Habak, an activist in the city’s rebel-held eastern part, said via Skype. He and other activists have also reported an increase in attacks using chemical gases, increasing civilian misery.
Life is slightly better in the western part of the city, where the government of President Bashar al-Assad maintains control and there are no airstrikes. But food stocks there have dwindled, some areas are without water and electricity, and many fear that the ability of Mr. Assad’s forces to protect them is slipping.
“Today, I went around for one hour looking for chicken and I couldn’t find any,” said Safwan, a merchant in western Aleppo who gave only his first name for fear of retribution for speaking to foreign news media. He said there were long lines at gas stations, bare shelves at fruit and vegetable stores, and hospitals overloaded with wounded soldiers, militiamen and civilians.
Aleppo, Syria’s industrial center before the war, has emerged as the conflict’s latest high-stakes battleground as the warring parties pour in fighters and resources to try to strike a definitive blow against their foes.
But in many ways, the battle for Aleppo reflects the wider struggle for Syria after five years of war, an increasingly intractable conflict in which the combatants invest all they have, but come no closer to defeating each other or reaching a political solution.
Ramzy Mardini, a Middle East analyst at the Atlantic Council, said the conflict had become like a line of dominoes in which the pieces are spread too far apart to knock others over as they fall.
“It doesn’t seem like one victory leads to another to a point where there is a convergence of victories going on for either side,” he said.
Aleppo has been divided since 2012, with the Assad government holding the west while rebels seeking to topple the government hold districts in the east and much of the surrounding countryside.
The recent battle to control the city began last month when pro-Assad forces, including fighters from Lebanon’s Hezbollah militant group, took advantage of air cover from Russian fighter jets to encircle the rebel-held east, cutting the main supply road to the north.
That led aid organizations to warn of a prolonged siege that could have endangered about 300,000 people living in rebel-held areas. But last week, rebel fighters in the city and to the west mounted an offensive to seize military installations in the southwest and open a new passage to the rebel-held districts.
They succeeded over the weekend, although control of the road remains too tenuous to allow for regular aid access. And 18 people were killed on Friday in airstrikes around Aleppo Province, medical crews and conflict monitors said.
Both the pro-Assad forces and the rebel fighters saw the battle as crucial to their progress in the war, and the fight revealed their strengths and weaknesses.
“The fighters attacking the regime from inside and outside Aleppo fought fiercely, knowing that this battle was a fateful one and would lift the siege on their families and children,” said Zakaria Malahifji, the political chief of a rebel group backed by the C.I.A. and its counterparts in European and Arab states.
But spearheading the rebel effort were hard-line Islamist groups including the Levant Conquest Front, which has been affiliated with Al Qaeda for years and only recently changed its name and claimed to have become independent. While American officials dismissed the rebranding, saying the group did not change its ideology or its goal of establishing an Islamic emirate in Syria, analysts said it allowed the jihadists to work more closely with other rebel groups, blurring the lines between them.
That complicates matters for the United States, which has tried to drive a wedge between the extremists and other rebels, and targeted the former with airstrikes. The jihadists’ prominent role in the Aleppo offensive showed that they remain militarily indispensable to the wider rebel movement and increased their popularity at time when many Syrians criticize the United States for not doing more to protect Syrian civilians.
For the Syrian government, the rebels’ swift breaking of the siege exposed the limits of its forces, who have become heavily dependent on foreign allies. Syria’s army has been ground down during the war through death, defections and frequent deployments. Russia has intervened to help out with airstrikes on rebel forces, and Hezbollah has sent skilled fighters who have led a number of advances. That combination has helped the government take territory, although it lacks the native forces needed to hold it.
The United States has not played a major role in the battle for Aleppo, instead focusing its effort on weakening the jihadists of the Islamic State, who have no significant presence in the city but control territory farther east.
There, American-backed forces have nearly succeeded in pushing the jihadists from Minbij, a town near the Turkish border that has served as a jihadist hub.
The greatest price for the recent fighting has been paid by Aleppo’s civilians. The encirclement of the rebel-held districts has left residents with dwindling supplies, and Syrian and Russian airstrikes frequently target civilian areas, damaging homes and medical facilities. And recent days have seen reports of poison gas attacks on rebel neighborhoods that have left residents sick.
This week, 15 doctors in eastern Aleppo released a public letter to President Obama, saying that 42 medical facilities had been targeted in July and calling for help to stop the bombs.
“Continued U.S. inaction to protect the civilians of Syria means that our plight is being willfully tolerated by those in the international corridors of power,” the letter read, accusing the United States and other world powers of standing idly by.
The deprivation and violence are greatest in the rebel-held areas.
Zahid Qaturji, a doctor at a hospital in eastern Aleppo, said his facility was bombed in April, killing five staff members and destroying the intensive-care unit and operating room. The staff salvaged what it could and kept working, now struggling to treat about 120 patients per day. He said the work keeps him too busy to consider where Aleppo is heading.
“We don’t think about the future very much,” he said. “We are happy to live each day and survive.”
But he said he did not expect the war to change course unless world powers can agree to end it.
“Hopefully there will be an end to the Syrian civilians’ misery, but we can’t see a light in the future,” he said.
The New York Times
