ERBIL, Kurdistan Region – Backed by Russian air raids, Syrian regime forces have made advances in Aleppo, a key northern city with a sizeable Kurdish population where all of the war’s major players have long vied for control.
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s forces recaptured Hardatneen on Tuesday, after overrunning two other villages in the same area the day before.
The victories bring the Syrian military to within three miles of two important Shiite villages, Nubul and Zahraa, bastions of regime support that have been besieged by various opposition groups for more than two years.
Anti-regime groups, many of them Sunni Muslim Islamists and fervently anti-Shiite, want access to the villages for their strategic value. In turn, regime forces want to break the sieges and gain an important foothold against the opposition.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a UK-based monitor, estimated that fighting since Monday had killed 15 regime soldiers and 20 on the opposition side.
The regime offensive began on September 30, after Russia openly stepped into the war with a massive air campaign in support of Assad. Russia and Iran have both been supporting the regime’s efforts to regain control of the city.
More than a hundred Iranian paramilitaries, many of them senior commanders, were killed around Aleppo in late 2015.
Aleppo, Syria’s largest city, remains a prize in a war where the regime has managed to retain control of the country’s east, as various forces arrayed against it hold on to the western parts.
Syria’s PYD group, which controls the country’s Kurdish north since declaring autonomy in 2013, has been seeking a corridor from its “cantons” to Aleppo’s Kurdish Sheikh Maqsud district.
PYD leader Salih Muslim said in October that he was considering a strategic alliance with Assad and Russia to achieve that goal.
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