Fighting shook Aleppo, Syria’s biggest city, yesterday as some of the heaviest battles yet in a city that has been a bastion of support for the regime ran into their third day, write Abigail Fielding-Smith in Beirut and Tobias Buck in Jerusalem.
Activists have claimed that more than 19,000 lives have been lost in 16 months of protests, crackdowns and escalating fighting in Syria. The figure includes nearly 5,000 members of the security forces, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a UK-based opposition-affiliated monitoring group, said.
Activists reported battles in the Saif al-Doula and Meridian districts of Aleppo, the country’s main commercial hub.