The war has spread to a fertile region east of Aleppo
WOMEN, their faces wrapped in scarves to protect them from the sun, bend over in the fields to pick cotton. Flocks of sheep kick up dust from tilled wheat fields, as young boys herd them along. Here in Raqqa province, east of Aleppo, life has gone on largely as normal for the last 19 months as the rest of Syria has descended into bloodshed. But since rebels seized the border town of Tal Abyad last month, the province has turned into a budding battleground.
"We are going to push down to the city of Raqqa, and this will weaken the regime’s control of Aleppo and Deir ez-Zor," explains Abu Hassan, a member of the Raqqa Revolutionary Military Council, which is based in a pink-walled former school in Tal Abyad. Every day the rebels, led by the Farouq brigade, launch attacks. One night they destroy a regime checkpoint, the next they capture the loyalist owner of a petrol-station and his militia. And every day volleys of gunfire ring out as felled fighters and civilians killed by shelling are ferried back to wailing mothers and stoic fathers in their villages.
East of Aleppo, far from the main arterial roads used by the regime to resupply its forces, Raqqa province may appear to have little strategic importance. But it is crucial to the regime’s survival, for it is part of the Jazeera region stretching across Raqqa into Hasaka and Deir ez-Zor in the east, which is Syria’s breadbasket.
WOMEN, their faces wrapped in scarves to protect them from the sun, bend over in the fields to pick cotton. Flocks of sheep kick up dust from tilled wheat fields, as young boys herd them along. Here in Raqqa province, east of Aleppo, life has gone on largely as normal for the last 19 months as the rest of Syria has descended into bloodshed. But since rebels seized the border town of Tal Abyad last month, the province has turned into a budding battleground.
"We are going to push down to the city of Raqqa, and this will weaken the regime’s control of Aleppo and Deir ez-Zor," explains Abu Hassan, a member of the Raqqa Revolutionary Military Council, which is based in a pink-walled former school in Tal Abyad. Every day the rebels, led by the Farouq brigade, launch attacks. One night they destroy a regime checkpoint, the next they capture the loyalist owner of a petrol-station and his militia. And every day volleys of gunfire ring out as felled fighters and civilians killed by shelling are ferried back to wailing mothers and stoic fathers in their villages.
East of Aleppo, far from the main arterial roads used by the regime to resupply its forces, Raqqa province may appear to have little strategic importance. But it is crucial to the regime’s survival, for it is part of the Jazeera region stretching across Raqqa into Hasaka and Deir ez-Zor in the east, which is Syria’s breadbasket.
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