Members of a rebel jihadist group, Hamza Abdualmuttalib, prepared for training near Aleppo, Syria’s largest population center.
BEIRUT, Lebanon — Syrian government forces on Saturday fought to regain control over areas that rebels claimed to have seized in recent days, with sustained skirmishing over neighborhoods in Aleppo and Damascus, the country’s two main cities and the most important symbols of the government’s power.
Some of the fiercest fighting that was reported took place in the Salaheddiin quarter of Aleppo, the first time that sustained street battles have erupted between the two sides so close to the center of the country’s commercial hub, long a bastion of support for President Bashar al-Assad. After two days of fighting, the government had been unable to drive out all the rebel fighters, and residents were fleeing for safety, according to activists reached by telephone as well as videos posted on YouTube.
One video that electrified opponents of the government showed the cleric in one of the area’s main mosques delivering the weekly Friday sermon with the rebel flag draped over his podium and a gun in one hand. “It was a sign that the neighborhood had been liberated,” said a spokesman in Aleppo for the opposition’s Local Coordination Committees, who used only his first name, Mohammed, because of safety concerns.
Soldiers from the rebels’ Free Syrian Army had stormed all government buildings in the area and raised the flag above them too, he said.
“This is the first time the neighborhood has witnessed such a fierce clash,” Mohammed said. “It used to just experience large protests followed by brief skirmishes.”
Mohammed said he could hear army trucks with loudspeakers circulating in the neighborhood, urging the rebel fighters to surrender. But more gunfire was the usual response, he said.
He described Salaheddiin as a dense, heavily populated neighborhood with many entrances, so it was difficult to control. “They seem to be mustering more forces to storm it later,” he said.
Concerns over Syria’s stockpile of chemical weapons flared again Saturday after a previously unknown Syrian general who defected to Turkey was quoted by Reuters as saying that Syria was moving its chemical stockpile to use against civilians. The general presented no evidence to support the claim.
That contradicted a recent briefing by a senior Obama administration official in Washington who said the Syrian government appeared to be shifting its considerable stockpile out of territory where it was losing control in order to safeguard it, not to use it. The White House said Saturday that it continued to closely monitor the stockpile.
The Syrian military appeared to be pushing back successfully against rebels in many places, including in some neighborhoods of the capital, Damascus. Syrians working in Jordan near the border who have relatives on the other side said that an attempt by rebel soldiers to seize the Nasib border crossing had been repulsed by government soldiers. The rebels still control a few main crossing points into Iraq and Turkey, several days after taking them.
But there were also unusual outbreaks of sudden anarchy, like a prison riot in Homs, which activists said security guards put down with tear gas.
In Damascus, the toll on ordinary life exacted by days of fighting began to deepen. There were long lines at some gas stations — with even the fancy cars of the elite forced to wait — and a dire shortage of bread, with most stores still closed. Hundreds of people waited in lines outside the state-run bakeries, the only ones operating.
People who fled embattled neighborhoods camped in schools, mosques, public gardens and construction sites. Stinking garbage piled up on street corners in some places.
Hundreds of soldiers patrolled the streets of the northern suburb of Qaboun, picking off pockets of rebel fighters. “The regime is cutting Qaboun into sectors by deploying tanks on the main roads and crossings to prevent any fighters from moving freely,” said a rebel fighter from the neighborhood who gave only his first name, Ibrahim.
After routing rebel fighters in the southern Damascus neighborhood of Midan a day earlier, the governor of the capital, Bashar al-Sabban, said it would take exactly five days to erase all the destruction created by the fierce street battles there, according to state-run television. The broadcast showed bulldozers already getting to work removing the carcasses of burned vehicles and other debris. The governor said families straggling back home had been given baskets of food — 15 percent of the population had returned, he said — and that electricity would be restored soon.
But the rebel forces still appeared able to carry out hit-and-run raids in the capital. A video posted on YouTube showed a smoldering police station in the southern Yarmouk neighborhood, the result of a rebel attack.
Hwaida Saad contributed reporting from Beirut, an employee of The New York Times from Damascus, Syria, and Kareem Fahim from Jabir, Jordan.
