Fighting over the north Syrian city of Aleppo continues, as ever, to rage, with the Syrian military recapturing the key artillery academy in the city over the weekend, and resuming a near total siege on the rebel-held eastern half of the city.
This returns the situation roughly to where it was this time last month, before the rebel Nusra Front launched a major offensive, seizing the academy and threatening to place the government-held western half of the city under a siege. Nusra is reported to be launching a counterattack, trying to once again reverse the momentum.
Nusra made its move into Aleppo in February, during an international ceasefire which they were not invited to participate in. Since then, the two sides have been fighting virtually non-stop, trading mortar fire into one another’s residential territory, and killing hundreds of bystanders.
While both sides seem to be able to reverse the situation enough to put the other in a state of siege for at least a few weeks at a time, neither has been able to make any serious territorial gains in months, meaning that the fighting has largely been fruitless exchanges of fire, killing a lot of people for very little.