REBELS BACKED BY captured tanks launched a fresh offensive on a government complex housing a police academy near the northern city of Aleppo today, prompting the government to respond with airstrikes to try to protect the strategic installation.
Setback
If rebels capture the complex on the outskirts of Aleppo, it would mark another setback for President Bashar Assad’s regime. In recent weeks, the regime has lost control of key infrastructure in the northeast including a hydroelectric dam, a major oil field and two army bases along the road linking Aleppo with the airport to its east.
Rebels also have been hitting the heart of Damascus with occasional mortars shells or bombings.
Yesterday, opposition fighters in the eastern province of Deir el-Zour overran a site known as al-Kibar, which was home to what is believed to have been a partly built nuclear reactor that Israeli warplanes bombed in 2007.
A year after the strike, the UN nuclear watchdog determined that the destroyed building’s size and structure fit specifications of a nuclear reactor. Syria never stated the purpose of the site.
Rebels have been trying for months to storm the government complex west of Aleppo in the suburb of Khan al-Asal, according to Rami Abdul-Rahman, the director of the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. The facility also includes several smaller army outposts charged with protecting the police academy inside the compound.
Aleppo has been the scene of some of the heaviest fighting of Syria’s nearly 2-year-old conflict.
Rebels have been trying for weeks to capture Aleppo’s International Airport. There were no reports of fighting for the airport today, but there have been battles around a section of the highway the army has been using to transport troops and supplies to a military base within the airport complex.
Photographer death
Also today, a French freelance photographer Olivier Voisin, who was wounded on Thursday in Syria and taken to Turkey for treatment, died of his wounds at an Istanbul hospital, the French Foreign Ministry said.
Voisin is the second French journalist this year to be killed while reporting on Syria’s civil war, which has proven to be one of the most dangerous conflicts for reporters to cover.
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