More than 1,000 militants surrenderd to Syrian government forces in Bustan Al-Qasir and Sheikh Sa’eed districts of the city of Aleppo, the Russian Defense Ministry announced on Friday. The surrenderd militants, have not been involved killing or kidnapping civilians in Aleppo, will be pardoned by the Syrian government.
On December 10, low intensity clashes continued in the city despite the official continuation of the ceasefire that was announced by Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov on Thursday.
There are little chances that Jabhat Fatah al-Sham (formerly Jabhat al-Nusra, the Syrian branch of al-Qaeda) and its allies will be able to hold the remaining eastern Aleppo pocket for a long time.
However, the specific time when the militant-held area fall into hands of government forces will depend on the ongoing US-Russian diplomatic standoff over Syria.
What holding up?The pocket will fall next week.
Well, logically as the pocket shrinks the total frontline that the Jihadists have to defend becomes smaller too, allowing them to better defend it. It’s like trying to squeeze a balloon that is half full of air. At first its easy, but as you press on more you reach the point where the thing becomes hard again and press all you want you can go no further. Here ends the analogy as the Jihadists have lost considerable forces to the fighting and desertion, they’re low on munitions and they’re low on morale. Plus the SAA can also concentrate its forces and firepower on an ever decreasing area. It has the potential to drag on for a long time, it also has the potential to be over very quickly.
We have to keep in mind that the SAA seems to prefer not wasting any manpower over Stalingrad style annihilations of surrounded pockets. The pattern so far seems to be to press Jihadists into an ever smaller pocket until they lose all hope and take the offer to surrender and a free bus ride to Idlib. Chances still are this is still what will happen with the Aleppo pocket too. Anyone dreaming of seeing the streets of Aleppo lined with the corpses of Al Nusra and its cronies might be disappointed..
How many jihadists are still in the pocket?I read that 1 000 have surrendered.What about the others?I think that they want to surrender,but their commanders dont allow them.And BTW I dont know whether the remaining terrorists want to go exactly to Idlib.After their failure in Aleppo,they won be greeted well
I think most of them want to collect the paycheck they were promised and escape to Turkey.
I think it works the other way. When wars are fought with bombs, rockets and artillery, the smaller the area you control, the more vulnerable you are. That’s what happened in the Sri Lanka conflict, when the Tamil Tigers were trapped in a small area, they simply couldn’t defend themselves any more.
smaller front line also means that the SAA now can rotate attacking units and put constant pressure on the pocket. as things are, terrorists haven’t gotten a good sleep in a long time, their front lines are shifting and collapsing, so i think the time of resistance is actually the time you can stretch the human body in those conditions. and once the human bodies of terrorists start failing due to exaustion and chronic lack of sleep, we will see a total collapse with only sporadic pockets of resistance being cleared. it now depends on keeping them on their toes. i suspect that the men who were pressed in joining will be the first to break.