Fighting continued again today in Syria’s largest city of Aleppo, with air strikes reported against the rebels and both sides again claiming progress in their efforts to take over the city, but no sign yet of the “decisive” battle so often promised.
There have been comments from unnamed Syrian officials however, suggesting that their end of the deployment of reinforcements is over, with the official putting the number of Syrian soldiers around the city’s outskirts at 20,000.
After rebels managed to quickly take several suburbs of Damascus and the regime has managed to retake those suburbs in fairly short order, all attention is on Aleppo, where neither side seems to be making any serious inroads but both sides seem entirely confident of their inevitable victory.
Aleppo is a hugely important prize for either rebels or regime, as it is Syria’s largest city, as well as its financial and industrial capital. Weeks of fighting have ground production in the city to a virtual halt, however, and it isn’t clear how quickly either side could get things back to normal after taking the city outright.