Rebels besiege airports as Syria death toll tops 60,000

Furious combat raged around strategic airports in northern Syria on Thursday, the day after the United Nations gave a staggering toll of 60,000 dead in the country’s 21-month civil war.

Insurgents besieged troops on the perimeter of the international airport in Aleppo, the hard fought-over main city of Syria’s north, and a military airbase in Idlib province, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

Aleppo’s critical civilian transportation hub has been closed since Tuesday after repeated attacks by rebels, according to an airport official, who said it would reopen as soon as the army regained control of the surrounding areas.

Rebels holding much of the area surrounding Aleppo were targeted by regime shelling overnight in the city’s Sakhur district and in the towns of Marea and Aazaz farther north near the Turkish border.

Meanwhile, hundreds of fighters with two hardcore Islamist rebel groups, the Al-Nusra Front and Ahrar al-Sham, fought soldiers around the Taftanaz airbase in the northwest province of Idlib, the British-based Observatory said, adding that airstrikes were blasting rebel positions.

The rebels had remotely detonated a bomb at one of the airport’s gates the day before but were pushed back by the army, according to both the Observatory and a military source inside the base.