Simultaneous advances by Syrian government and Kurdish-led forces into eastern Aleppo on Sunday

BEIRUT (AP) — Simultaneous advances by Syrian government and Kurdish-led forces into eastern Aleppo on Sunday set off a tide of displacement inside the divided city, with thousands of residents evacuating their premises, and threatened to cleave the opposition's enclave. Rebel defenses collapsed as government forces pushed into the city's Sakhour neighborhood, coming within about a half-mile of commanding a corridor in eastern Aleppo for the first time since rebels swept into the city in 2012, according to Syrian state media and the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group. The government's push -- backed by thousands of Shiite militia fighters from Lebanon, Iraq, and Iran, and under the occasional cover of the Russian airstrikes -- has laid waste to Aleppo's eastern neighborhoods. Syrian government forces and their allies captured another major eastern Aleppo neighbourhood and several smaller areas Monday, putting much of the northern part of Aleppo’s besieged rebel-held areas under government control for the first time in four years, state media reported. Masaken Hanano was the first district the rebels took in the summer of 2012 in a move that divided the city into a rebel-held east and a regime-controlled west. Aleppo, which was Syria's biggest city before the start of a civil war that has killed hundreds of thousands of people, is divided between the government-held west and rebel-held east, where U.N. officials say at least 250,000 people are under siege. Its fall underscored how far the tide has turned in favor of Assad's forces, 5½ years into a war that has killed a half million people and displaced most of Syria's prewar population.
Syrian government forces and Kurdish People's Protection Units capture more than a third of rebel-controlled eastern Aleppo.