Territorial gains break more than two months of stalemate as large areas of country's second city change hands
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Martin Chulov, in Beirut and Mona Mahmood
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 25 October 2012 19.23 BST
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Syrian rebel fighters pause as they make further territorial gains inside Aleppo. Photograph: Fabio Bucciarelli/AFP/Getty Images
After more than two months of near stalemate, rebel groups have advanced into three government-held areas of central Aleppo.
This was the first time that territory has changed hands since mid-August but it did not appear to mark a decisive shift in the battle for Syria's second city, where a lull in fighting is expected to begin tomorrow.
Syrian officials and many rebel groups say they have agreed a truce to mark the Muslim Eid al-Adha festival. If it takes hold, it will be the first to do so since Syria's popular uprising became a civil war.
But expectations of a truce are low after months of fighting across the country, which have left historic cities in ruins and a seemingly unstoppable cycle of violence.
Regime officials said they would honour the ceasefire agreement brokered by UN peace envoy Lakhdar Brahimi unless they were attacked. But at least one Islamist group said it would not support the agreement, while the deeply fragmented Free Syria Army (FSA) said most units would cautiously back it.
Rebel groups claimed gains in two Christian areas of Aleppo as well as a Kurdish enclave.
A rebel fighter in Aleppo, Abu Yousef, said: "Brigades of the FSA were able to progress from al-Ashrafiyeh district. There was also progress in al-Midan and Sulaiman al-Halabi districts. In Khan al -Assal district, there is a police school that was under siege by the FSA for 10 days. The Syrian army was sending reinforcements every day to ease the siege. Today a convoy was heading towards the school and was faced by fire from the FSA and could not get there."
Intelligence and security bases, including the air force intelligence headquarters, are a target for the rebels because they are known to house thousands of detainees rounded up since the uprising began 19 months ago. "The FSA had to take al-Ashrafiyeh district to be able to reach the criminal branch – and they did," said Abu Yousef. "The advance now is just around the criminal security and it is not easy.
"There are spots of power for the Syrian army like the criminal security in al-Ashrafiyeh, political security in al-Azziziyeh and air force security and intelligence in New Aleppo. If the FSA can liberate all these branches, we can say at that time that Aleppo has been liberated entirely."
Rebels claimed that Kurdish groups, headed by the PKK, facilitated their entry to the Ashrafiyeh district after a deal was struck for neither side to attack the other.
The Free Syria Army has previously accused members of the PKK of siding with the Assad regime.
"The PKK had agreed not to interfere and not to support any side of the conflict," said Abu Yousef. "We did not attack any members of the PKK [today], in fact they pulled out to clear the way for us. The clashes were with the Syrian army. Since the beginning of the revolution the regime has been trying to keep the PKK on its side but I think now it is going to lose them."
The position of the PKK has been unclear. An organised and motivated fighting force, they would pose a threat to Turkish interests if they chose to use the instability in Syria to intensify their decades-long cross-border insurgency.
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