Aleppo Citizens Celebrate Liberation of City (Photo & Video)

Residents of Aleppo have celebrated the liberation of the city from militants and the beginning of the Christmas holidays.

In the evening on December 20, the Syrian city of Aleppo remained in an atmosphere of celebration of the victory over Islamists. Thousands of people gathered on the streets of the city and at the university in order to mark the liberation and the beginning of the Christmas holidays. Christians and Muslims, gathered together, turned on lights on a Christmas tree, a brass band played, people chanted slogans, sang and danced.

Meanwhile, the situation in the areas, which until recently were under the control of Islamists, remains ambiguous. The most part of media reported about evacuation of the last group of militants from Aleppo on December 19, but the declared number of evacuated people shows that militants still can be in the city. There is a bit amount of them, but they can be there.

Information about this almost does not get in media. However, on December 20, the Syrian SANA state news agency reported, citing some own sources, that the evacuation of the last group of terrorists and their families is delayed due to disagreements between militant groups. The fact that on December 20, several shots were fired on al-Kallyasa district, located in the heart of Aleppo, is another indirect confirmation of the presence of Islamists somewhere in al-Ansari Mashhad district.

In any case, radical Islamists certainly remain in Aleppo. During the start of the celebration, a bomb exploded nearby. There was nobody next to the scene of the explosion, so nobody was hurt. But the fact of the explosion shows that terrorists will continue to try to destabilize the situation in the city again. Syrian police and intelligence services still will have a lot of work here.

Militants in the south-western outskirts of Aleppo also do not ‘sit quietly’. In the morning and afternoon on December 20, Islamists from the vicinity of Al-Rashidin district several times opened fire on positions of the government forces, stationed in the area of the 1070 Apartment Project, the Al-Hikma School, and even Al-Sukkari district, recaptured just the day before.