Operation to liberate Aleppo 'reaches end, terrorists leave last holdouts'

Syrian forces are almost in full control of the northern city of Aleppo, nearly three weeks after Damascus and its allies launched a major offensive to recapture the terrorist-held part of the city, a pro-opposition monitoring group says.

According to Press TV, the so-called Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said Monday that the battle for Aleppo had reached its end and the government forces were making sweeping advances into the militant-held sector of the city.

The group’s director, Rami Abdulrahman, said the terrorists had now withdrawn from six neighborhoods in the city, their last holdouts in Aleppo. 

"The battle of Aleppo has reached its end. It is just a matter of a small period of time, no more, no less... it's a total collapse," Abdulrahman added. 

Meanwhile, Syria's chief opposition coordinator, Riyad Hijab, said the opposition won't make concessions with the Damascus.  

Hijab, who presides over the High Negotiations Committee (HNC), said on Monday that defeat in Aleppo would not change the position of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s opponents, who seek his removal from power.

Syrian forces announced earlier on Monday that they were in the last steps of liberating Aleppo, saying almost all but two percent of the neighborhoods in the eastern part of the city, which was under the control of the militants, had been liberated.

The Syrian military said it had regained control over 98 percent of eastern Aleppo and that there were only some pockets of militants and civilians in a small sliver of territory in the center of the city.

The announcement came hours after Syrians and allied forces managed to retake Sheikh Saeed, one of the largest neighborhoods in the southern part of Aleppo’s militant-dominated east. The army also seized control of al-Fardous neighborhood, one of the most populated districts to the north of Sheikh Saeed.

Terrorists had earlier admitted the loss of key areas in Aleppo, saying they were being squeezed from every side. They, however, insisted that they were holding seven percent of the areas they used to control.

Maps distributed by the army on Monday showed that the tiny portion of Aleppo remaining under the control of Terrorists was a small silver of land located adjacent to the government-held parts of Aleppo in its center.

Russia, a major ally of Syria in the fight against Daesh, has warned that Daesh is still a major threat despite the terrorist group’s defeats in Syria and neighboring Iraq.

The Kremlin spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said Monday that the fall of the ancient city of Palmyra into the hands of Daesh over the weekend showed the seriousness of the Daesh threat.

“The threat of losing Palmyra is a loss for all civilized humankind, not just for Russia,” Peskov said, blaming the United States for the loss of the city, which the Syrians had recaptured earlier this year.

SS