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Rebel forces have swept into Syria’s second city Aleppo after mounting a lightning offensive that poses the biggest threat to Bashar al-Assad’s regime in the simmering years-long civil conflict.
Images circulated on Friday night on opposition-linked social media showed rebel forces posing in front of Aleppo’s citadel, which lies in the heart of the city.
The militants, led by Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, said on Friday night that they were “expanding their control inside the city of Aleppo” after launching the offensive on Wednesday.
The assault comes as Assad faces growing domestic and external pressures in a country shattered by years of civil war that erupted after a 2011 popular uprising.
He was able to put down the original rebellion with military backing from Russia, Iran and Iranian-backed militant groups, including Hizbollah, the Lebanese militant movement.
But over the past year, Israel has stepped up its air strikes on Iranian-affiliated targets in Syria as it has launched an offensive against Hizbollah in Lebanon, weakening the groups that have played a crucial role in supporting the Assad regime.
HTS’s ability to fight inside Aleppo, which endured some of the worst fighting of the civil war, is a devastating blow to Assad and underscores the regime’s weakness.
Government forces took control of Aleppo in 2016 after laying siege to the city and, supported by Russian air strikes driving out rebels based in the city’s eastern areas, turned the war in Assad’s favour.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a UK-based monitoring group, said that HTS had taken control of more than half of the city of Aleppo in the just a few hours “without any resistance from regime forces”.
But Syrian state news said that the army had arrested “a number of terrorists who took photos in several neighbourhoods of Aleppo to show that terrorist groups have seized and controlled these neighbourhoods”.
It added that its military was continuing to “repel attacks by terrorist organisations in the Aleppo and Idlib countryside”.
State media reported that Russian forces had killed more than 200 “terrorists” as part of a joint operation with the Syrian military on Friday.
Aleppo’s international airport was closed and all flights suspended, the UN said. The fighting has displaced large numbers of civilians in Aleppo and the surrounding countryside, the UN and Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
Dozens were killed on Friday, mostly regime and rebel forces but also civilians, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
HTS, which has controlled one of the armed opposition’s last strongholds in the north-western Syrian region of Idlib, is listed as a terrorist organisation by the US state department.
Neighbouring Turkey has backed Syrian rebels and exercises control over a swath of northern pockets of Syria. Although Ankara is known to have a relationship with HTS, it has less control over the militants than other rebel groups.