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Outsider Bogged Down In Protracted Battle For Aleppo

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  • Outsider Bogged Down In Protracted Battle For Aleppo

    OUTSIDER BOGGED DOWN IN PROTRACTED BATTLE FOR ALEPPO

    AlArabiya.net
    November 1, 2012 Thursday
    UAE

    Munzir is still a teenager but he's already a veteran of the Syrian
    war. He fought in his hometown, driving out regime soldiers, and is
    now trying to do the same in Aleppo.

    Except that winning Aazaz only took a couple of weeks.

    More than three months after moving into Syria's commercial capital,
    rebels lay claim to a patchwork of Sunni Arab neighborhoods dotted
    across the north, south and east of Aleppo.

    The fighting lays bare their inability to capture a metropolitan city
    with limited weapons unknown to many of the fighters and to win over
    some 2.5 million residents to a rebellion increasingly hijacked by
    an Islamist agenda.

    "It's a very different fight here," conceded Munzir as he got ready
    to go home on leave for 48 hours after two months' fighting.

    "People in Aazaz worked with us and respected us, but here half the
    people don't protect us and don't like us," he said.

    None of the 12 men in his unit come from Aleppo, which makes it all
    the harder to fight urban warfare in such a large, unknown city.

    Armed only with homemade bombs, Kalashnikovs, RPGs and machineguns,
    it's a painful fight, inch by inch. Munzir says his last operation
    ended in retreat after one fighter was killed and four others were
    wounded.

    An AFP team watched last week as it took an hour and 10 minutes to
    prepare and then take out a regime sniper position -- essentially
    blowing up one storey of an apartment block.

    Abu Mohammed, a charismatic and respected commander in Aleppo who
    claims to command 350 to 400 fighters under the United Salam Brigades,
    concedes there is a lack of indigenous recruits in some units.

    Sitting in olive groves where he is training men for commando
    operations, he blames the problem on so many people fleeing Aleppo
    when the fighting started, and clerics and businessmen in the city
    who he says support the regime.

    Air strikes and shelling have destroyed families, devastated homes
    and ruined businesses. Mushrooming piles of rubbish lie rotting in
    the streets.

    People complain about power cuts, food shortages, rising fuel prices,
    losing their jobs and of course, they are frightened.

    But in rebel-held areas, few if any openly criticize the Free Syrian
    Army (FSA), the main armed group fighting to bring down President
    Bashar al-Assad.

    At a checkpoint behind the frontline, a woman arrived in tears from
    a visit to her daughter's home, which the family abandoned in haste
    under fire.

    "I came to have a look and found everything stolen," she sobbed,
    clutching a few bags of children's winter clothes.

    The FSA offered little comfort other than putting her in a taxi and
    discouraging AFP from asking her questions.

    "We don't know everyone here," shrugged one of the fighters.

    In the next street, retired Armenian teacher Kohareen ignored FSA
    calls to evacuate. In her 60s, she says she has nowhere else to go.

    Bombed-out buses seal off sniper alleys and Islamist graffiti has been
    sprayed onto buildings of what was once a thriving, Muslim-Christian
    community.

    "We want peace for everyone, for everyone to come back home. Life was
    good. We were comfortable," she said. With a rebel gunman standing
    below, she added: "God willing the FSA will protect us."

    'Problem in Aleppo is the people'

    She went back inside and defected lieutenant, Ahmed Saadeen, 24,
    burst into complaints about why the city was taking so long to capture.

    "The problem in Aleppo is the people. It's as if they don't care. For
    one month I haven't been home on leave, so how can they celebrate
    (the recent Muslim holiday of) Eid while people are dying?" he said.

    Experts say the battle for Aleppo will be protracted given the
    rebels' shortage of heavy weapons and with the regime keen to avoid
    the international condemnation that would come from inflicting major
    massacres.

    Marwa Daoudy, a lecturer in international relations at Oxford
    University, says Aleppo reflects the stalemate in the rest of the
    country, but that its urban elites set it apart from disadvantaged
    towns easily captured by the rebels.

    The merchant class, Christians and Muslims, have prospered since the
    economic reforms of 2005, she said.

    Although they have become much more critical of the regime, many
    people are nervous about insecurity and the future as the Islamist
    agenda promoted by some of the rebel groups has hijacked the uprising.

    "Clearly the basis for the FSA is very much in the poorer areas and
    so far in the last year and a half the heart of Aleppo had been very
    much outside the conflict except protests at the university," Daoudy
    told AFP.

    "On the Christian side, they're worried about the post-Assad period
    in terms of the treatment of minorities, but the Sunnis are divided.

    "People fear now for their security and the future of the country.

    People also don't know who some of the insurgents are and what their
    agenda is," she said.

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