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.