Aleppo is an ancient metropolis, and one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world; it has been inhabited since perhaps as early as the 6th millennium BC. The city’s significance in history has been its location at one end of the Silk Road, which passed through central Asia and Mesopotamia. When the Suez Canal was inaugurated in 1869, trade was diverted to sea and Aleppo began its slow decline. At the fall of the Ottoman Empire after World War I, Aleppo ceded its northern hinterland to modern Turkey, as well as the important railway connecting it to Mosul.
Rebel fighters break siege in southern Aleppo, sources say
But little has changed for the besieged residents of rebel-held eastern Aleppo neighborhoods, who have been enduring acute shortages of food and medicine, as the fighting remains too fierce for aid to be delivered, the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights and humanitarian workers operating in the area say.Syrian state news agency SANA says that the rebels have not broken the siege of the city’s eastern neighborhoods. The agency reports that government troops had inflicted “heavy losses” on rebel groups in the fighting raging in the south and southwest of the city. More here from CNN.
A coalition of Rebel Forces Has broken the siege of Aleppo according to reports Rebels say they have breached the siege imposed by the Syrian government on opposition neighbourhoods in the northern city of Aleppo, in a major military breakthrough after intense fighting.
The Syrian Regime seized the only route into rebel-held areas in northern Aleppo last month, prompting a rebel counteroffensive from the city’s south.
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