NCRI – Bashar al-Assad’s army is not involved in the ground battle in the city of Aleppo, and the soldiers who are fighting to win ground for the Syrian dictator are mainly from the Iranian regime’s Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) and their affiliated foreign militia including the Lebanese Hezbollah, according to Brigadier General Mithghal al-Batish of the Free Syrian Army (FSA).
Assad’s strategy for capturing Aleppo over the past five months has been for the IRGC and its affiliated militias to attack the city from the ground, while Russia jets bombard it from the air, General al-Batish told the ncr-iran.org website in an interview this week.
The Assad regime is in particular carrying out a “heavy propaganda campaign” in Aleppo to portray the scene as though Assad’s forces are present in the battles, he said.
“In reality there are no Syrian soldiers fighting in the warzone there. There are just a few senior army officers who have been brought there to raise the morale of Assad’s forces and in order to gain international support and win concessions in the negotiations in Geneva. The primary activity of these army commanders is to serve as translators and guides for the foreign troops who are present,” he added.
“When the Russian bombardments were halted the revolutionary Syrian opposition forces launched a counter attack and achieved large victories.”
Through their victories, the FSA managed to show that those fighting for Assad in the region are “foreign fighters and are not natives who know the ground.”
“These victories greatly demoralized Assad’s forces who have now realized that it was wrong of them to rely on Russian air support to turn the tables.”
“The revolutionary forces managed to bring about a high casualty rate on the enemy, eliminating a large number of IRGC forces, their militias and Hezbollah. They also managed to liberate nine villages including one which lies across a key transit route for aid supplies running through Aleppo, Idlib and Hama.”
General al-Batish pointed out that Syrian opposition revolutionaries have posted photographs of their victories and also of the Iranian regime’s forces that they have taken as prisoners.
Iran’s regime has deployed tens of thousands of forces in Syria composed of the IRGC and its regular army, as well as foreign mercenaries from Iraq, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Pakistan and other countries.
Iranian Resistance officials have stated that the Iranian regime is strategically trapped in Syria and has failed to achieve any strategic objective to sustain Bashar Assad’s dictatorship, thereby compounding the effect of heavy losses on the morale of Iranian forces in Syria.
The battles last week were centered around the strategic town of Khan Tuman, south of Aleppo, which the Iranian regime had sought to capture as part of its plan to besiege Aleppo. Tehran’s forces were repulsed from the area.
