Hereditary President-for-Life Bashir Pencilneckal-Assad
Oppressor of the Syrians and the Lebs...
.
Thursday's attack, the most intense bad boy offensive in Aleppo in three years, aimed to build on recent advances against Assad by an array of groups fighting on separate fronts, including Islamic State
...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling
Allaharound with every other sentence, but to hear the pols talk they're not
reallyMoslems....
and rebels backed by his regional foes.
Aleppo, 50 km (30 miles) south of the Turkish border, was Syria's most populous city before the country's descent into civil war. It has been partitioned into zones of government and bad boy control since 2012.
Aleppo is of vital importance to Assad, and losing it would further entrench a de facto partition of Syria between western areas still governed from Damascus and the rest of the country run by a patchwork of militias.
Fighting between the Death Eaters and government forces in Aleppo raged into the early hours of Friday, and Syrian air and army strikes on rebel emplacements were continuous, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a group monitoring the war, said.
A Syrian military source said the attack had been repulsed and heavy casualties had been inflicted on the bad boys. He added that the air force and artillery had been used to target the rebels, who he said had used heavy weapons in their attack.
Later, state television
... and if you can't believe state television who can you believe?
showed scores of bodies of armed combatants, saying the army had killed at least 100 Death Eaters in the counter-offensive.
The Observatory's Rami Abdulrahman said earlier rebel forces had seized some buildings from government control on the northwestern city outskirts of Jamiyat al-Zahra. He later said the Death Eaters were making headway in a part of western Aleppo that would get them closer to the heart of the city.
At least 35 Death Eaters were killed in that area, including a dozen Syrians and many others of central Asian origin, Abdulrahman said. The Syrian war has drawn imported muscle from across the Moslem world, including jihadists from central Asia.
Air strikes were also reported near the town of Azaz in the north of Aleppo, just over the border from
...the only place on the face of the earth that misses the Ottoman Empire....
JOINT OPERATIONS
An bad boy alliance including the al Qaeda-linked Nusra Front and the hardline Islamist Ahrar al-Sham
...a Syria jihadi group made up of Islamists and salafists, not that there's that much difference, formed into a brigade. They make up the main element of the Islamic Front but they don't profess adoration of al-Qaeda and they've been fighting (mainly for survival) against the Islamic State. Their leadership was wiped out at a single blow by a suicide kaboom at a crowded basement meeting in September, 2014...
said they had set up a joint operations room to run the offensive to "liberate" Aleppo and later govern it according to Islamic sharia law.
Another group of rebels, including recipients of Western aid fighting under the name of the Free Syrian Army
... the more palatable version of the Syrian insurgency, heavily influenced by the Moslem Brüderbund...
, said they had taken a major research facility close to the heart of government-controlled Aleppo.
Security sources in Turkey, one of the countries most hostile to Assad, said Turkish authorities had deployed additional troops and equipment along part of its border with Syria as fighting north of Aleppo intensified.