#aleppo

#aleppo

Spent bullet shell casings litter the classrooms and corridors of Qassem Amin school in Aleppo's Ashrafieh neighbourhood. Desks barricade the stairwells; glass from shattered windows crunches underfoot. The school's playground turned into a battleground last week, as it sat on the front line of fierce fighting between fighters from the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) and Syrian government forces. list of 3 itemsend of list SDF snipers had commandeered the top floor of the school five months earlier, while classes continued below, school staff explained.

The strike marks a widening of hostilities which had largely been contained to Ashrafieh and Sheikh Maqsoud neighbourhoods. A drone has struck a governorate building in Aleppo, marking a sharp escalation in fighting between the Syrian army and the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). The drone, believed to be launched by Kurdish-led SDF on Saturday, hit the building as several high-ranking officials, including Aleppo's governor and two Syrian government ministers, were holding a news conference inside.

A suicide bomber targeted a group of Syrian police officers in the city of Aleppo killing one member of the security forces and wounding several others, the official news agency SANA reports. The incident, hours before the new year on Wednesday, follows the bombing of an Alawite mosque in Homs that killed at least eight people on Friday. The Aleppo governorate administration said the assailant blew himself up after officers approached to detain him in the city's Bab al-Faraj neighbourhood.

Syrian authorities reported that they have killed three ISIL fighters and arrested four others in a coordinated operation in Aleppo, marking a significant action against the group.