Fighters and their allies shelled Syria's second city Aleppo on Friday, in a major offensive against government troops that has sparked some of the deadliest fighting the country has seen in years. The violence has killed 242 people, according to a Syrian war monitor, most of them combatants on both sides but also including civilians, including 24 dead, most of them in Russian air strikes.
The offensive began at a sensitive time for Syria and the region, with a fragile ceasefire between Hezbollah and Israel taking effect earlier this week in neighbouring Lebanon.
Syria's civil war began when President Bashar al Assad's forces cracked down in 2011 on pro-democracy protests.
Since then, it has killed more than 500,000 people, displaced millions and battered the country's infrastructure and industry.
Over the years, the conflict has morphed into a complex war drawing in fighters and foreign powers, including allies Russia, Iran and Hezbollah.
While the army regained control over most of the territory that it lost earlier in the war, the area where the fighters and their allies are based has been subject to a truce since 2020.
This week, fighters launched a major surprise offensive against government forces.
On Friday, they shelled a university student residence in government-held Aleppo, northern Syria's main city, according to state media, which reported four civilian deaths in the latest attack.
By Friday, they had wrested more than 50 towns and villages in northern Syria, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, the biggest advances that anti-government factions had made in years.
The fighters had on Thursday cut the highway linking Aleppo to Syria's capital Damascus, according to the Britain-based Observatory. "The highway has now been put out of service, after it was reopened by regime forces years ago," said the monitor, which has a network of sources inside Syria. The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said "more than 14,000 people -- nearly half are children -- have been displaced" by the violence.
At a press conference earlier this week, Mohamed Bashir of Hayat Tahrir al Sham (HTS) said: "This operation aims to repel the sources of fire of the criminal enemy from the frontlines." HTS, led by Al Qaeda's former Syria branch, controls swathes of the northwest Idlib region as well as small parts of neighbouring Aleppo, Hama and Latakia provinces.
The Idlib region is subject to a ceasefire, repeatedly violated but which had largely been holding, brokered by Türkiye and Russia after a Syrian government offensive in March 2020.
A correspondent based in areas said there were intense exchanges of fire in an area just seven kilometres from the city of Aleppo.
HTS has close ties with Turkish-backed factions, and analyst Nick Heras of the New Lines Institute for Strategy and Policy said the fighters were "trying to preempt the possibility of a Syrian military campaign in the region of Aleppo". - AFP
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