Rebel-Held Land Could Be Safe Haven in Syria, Clinton Says

BEIRUT, Lebanon — The clamorous heart of Aleppo, the ancient city with its cobbled streets and mazy bazaars, fell silent on Tuesday as residents there and across Syria’s sprawling commercial capital fled the streets and cowered indoors, dreading the rat-tat-tat of machine gun fire and the echoing roar of government helicopters.

Except for the helicopters, the government disappeared, said residents reached by telephone. There was no army and no traffic police, and all state employees were ordered to stay home, warned via official television broadcasts that they would be targeted by the rebel street fighters infiltrating central neighborhoods.

“People are still in shock that this is happening — they thought it would be limited to one neighborhood, but it is growing in size to other neighborhoods,” said Fadi Salem, an academic visiting his family. “They are scared of chaos and lawlessness more than anything else.”

Residents said there were clashes not just between the government and the insurgents, but also between rival militias from the countryside fighting for control of individual streets in at least one southern neighborhood. In a central old quarter, one man said a friend had warned him not to visit because young gunmen had established a checkpoint to rob car passengers.

Damascus and Aleppo had been the two significant holdouts in the fighting that has gradually engulfed the rest of Syria since the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad began in March 2011. But now the whole country is inflamed. Guerrillas from the loosely affiliated Free Syrian Army launched major assaults in both cities via sympathetic, anti-regime neighborhoods in the two cities, which vie for the title of the oldest urban centers on earth.

Much is at stake. Whoever controls the two jewels-in-the-crown controls Syria.

In Damascus and its surroundings, a frontal assault on the rebels by some of the government’s most elite soldiers starting late last week largely smashed the toeholds they had claimed, although skirmishing continued to flare on Monday. Syrian television broadcast photographs of government soldiers kicking down doors and hauling off suspected insurgents on the city’s outskirts.

Fighting in Aleppo, on the other hand, first limited to Saleheddin, a poor, southern neighborhood, has widened as more rebel fighters spread through the city, said residents and activists.

“I am not sure if they are trying to take over neighborhoods or just to create the impression that they are everywhere,” said Mr. Salem. So far they have claimed to control neighborhoods, or at least streets, where the poor Sunni Muslim majority is most likely to give them succor, he said.

But in Aleppo, as in Damascus, the rebels will probably have to fade back into the countryside once the government mounts a major offensive. They will have made their point, however, that no place is immune.

“The government is trying to regain the initiative from the rebels,” said Jeff White, a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy who has been studying the military situation in Syria. “The government forces have not been able to do this easily, despite their numbers and use of heavy weapons.”

Free Syrian Army elements, he said in an e-mail, “are defeating some offensive actions, seizing government positions and facilities, and making road movement more difficult.”

Other analysts said the government seemed to be favoring standoff techniques, like using the helicopters in Aleppo, to avoid casualties.

“They are using this tactic because they are desperately afraid of using up too many of their most loyal troops in an urban assault,” said W. Andrew Terrill, a Middle East specialist at the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle Barracks, Pa.

In Washington, the secretary of state, Hillary Rodham Clinton, speaking as though the Syrian insurgency’s momentum was now unstoppable, said its territorial gains might be leveraged into safe havens. “We have to work closely with the opposition,” she told reporters, “because more and more territory is being taken and it will, eventually, result in a safe haven inside Syria, which will then provide a base for further actions by the opposition.”

But a United Nations diplomat familiar with the thinking of the rebels said they had suspended the safe haven idea until foreign allies agree to provide air cover. So far the West considers that a step too far.

The insurgents fear that without such cover, they would be vulnerable to attacks by Syria’s formidable air force. They also feel more secure living amid the mosaic of ethnic villages in central and northern Syria — with hamlets of Mr. Assad’s Alawite sect rubbing shoulders with those of his government’s mostly Sunni Muslim opponents. Despite occasional massacres, that proximity forces some restraint on the part of the government, the diplomat said.

Instead, the fighting in Aleppo and Damascus appears to indicate that the insurgents want to annoy the government — kind of like a mosquito, pricking it constantly and wearing it down before flitting away.

In Aleppo on Tuesday morning, parents stood on street corners with their children pointing at the helicopters clattering overhead, a novelty. But the fighting spread, and the sound of machine gun fire intensified — although it was hard to tell if it was coming from the helicopters or being aimed at them, residents said. One man said he had seen one helicopter fire a rocket.

As the fighting seemed to widen, the city of more than two million people, the largest in Syria, became what one person described as “so quiet, it’s spooky.” Those not fleeing stayed indoors, suffering through extended power cuts. There were also reports of a riot at the central prison that was repressed with violence.

A 64-year-old merchant said the trip to the airport, usually 20 minutes on a highway, took 45 minutes as he detoured through back streets in neighborhoods devoid of fighting and chaos. The airport was crammed with passengers leaving for Beirut, Dubai and other cities, he said.

The city felt like a ghost town, residents said, but occasionally sounded like a combat zone. That was partly from the helicopters, and partly from the heavy artillery that the Syrian Army fires incessantly at insurgents in the countryside from bases ringing Damascus.

Majed Abdel Nour, the spokesman in Aleppo for the Shaam News Network, an activist organization, said 22 people had died in urban fighting. He denied that any real Free Syrian Army units were fighting for control of individual streets or robbing people. “There are individual cases — some people are doing it, but it’s not the F.S.A.,” he said.

The Free Syrian Army issued a statement telling people to stay home and cooperate with their neighbors to “prevent acts of theft and rioting.”

With so many men running around with guns, it was impossible to identify the good guys, residents said. “It is just so hard to figure who is F.S.A. and who is a thug,” said one 25-year-old woman reached via Skype. “In brief, I am just terrified.”