Syrian rebels assist a comrade who was wounded during clashes with government troops in the Salhin district of Aleppo on July 31.
BEIRUT, Lebanon — Syrian rebels said they took control of at least two important police stations in central Aleppo on Tuesday, maintaining their hold on several neighborhoods despite air assaults and shelling from government troops.
Nearly two weeks have passed since the fighting began for control of Aleppo, Syria’s largest city and commercial center, and both sides seem to be digging in for an extended battle.
Residents and activists said the Syrian army was attacking from a military base on the city’s southern edge, while rebel commanders and activists said they controlled eastern sections of the city as they continued to fight for neighborhoods near the center of the city, and in Salaheddiin, a large neighborhood in the southwest part of Aleppo.
The larger of the two police stations that rebels claimed to have seized on Tuesday lies near the old city of Aleppo and its ancient iron gate. The second, smaller station is a few miles away, and rebels and activists described both locations as strategic because Syrian troops had been using them as bases, dividing rebel fighters in the surrounding neighborhoods.
“Since the beginning of the uprising, this criminal” — a common reference among rebels for President Bashar al-Assad — “transformed these stations into military centers,” said Col. Abdul Jabbar al Okeidi, head of the Aleppo military council of the Free Syrian Army, the largest armed resistance group in Syria. “There are no more policemen, just security forces and thugs and snipers.”
Analysts said that the Syrian police had not been generally involved in Syria’s 17-month-old conflict, but police stations — as fortified government institutions inside neighborhoods — have become increasingly valuable military locations. Rebels said that the Syrian army had been using jail cells to hold captured rebel fighters, while gathering troops at the stations to stage attacks or fire from the rooftops.
The stations “also represent a source of intelligence and a network for information for the regime as well as a refuge for government officials,” said Elias Hanna, a retired Lebanese general and an expert on the Syrian military. “Taking over a police station means denying the government a presence in the area, and controlling it.”
The battles for the stations appear to have been bloody. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an opposition group based in Britain, described the largest of the two stations as a three-story building manned by dozens of officers and soldiers who were killed during a battle that lasted between seven and eight hours. Colonel Okeidi said around 50 Syrian soldiers had been captured, including a colonel — a claim, like the others involving the death toll, that could not be independently verified.
Rebels also posted a video online that they said showed the second, smaller police station after fighting had ended. It included footage of rebel fighters with AK-47s walking through a ransacked, bullet-riddled station, stepping over at least a dozen bodies.
Earlier this week, rebels said they seized an important checkpoint northwest of Aleppo, making it easier to move in supplies and troops from the Turkish border. But for residents of Aleppo, as the fighting has continued, basic needs have become harder to satisfy. Several people in Aleppo on Tuesday said that gas and food are scarce or unavailable as shop owners stay closed and families try to hoard whatever they can. “There is no water or electricity in many areas and the schools are now overcrowded with the displaced” said Abou Raed, an activist in Aleppo.
He added: “People are not really moving out now because of the shelling.” In neighborhoods across much of the city, residents said the streets were empty and quiet Tuesday except for the sound of gunfire, helicopters and artillery shells.
Outside Syria, meanwhile, divisions among opposition groups appeared to deepen. Four months after several important figures broke away from the Syrian National Council, the main opposition group outside of Syria, the offshoot organization — the Council of Syrian Revolutionary Trustees — nominated one of its own leaders, Haytham al-Maleh, to form a transitional government. Mr. Maleh, a former political prisoner who resigned from the Syrian National Council over what he described as inefficiencies, said that he would form a government including all sides of the opposition, arguing that a new government must be formed immediately to avoid a “political or administrative void” once the Assad regime is toppled.
Mr. Maleh said his group would move to Aleppo after what he called its liberation from Assad government control.
Dalal Mawad and Hwaida Saad contributed reporting from Beirut, and an employee of the The New York Times from Aleppo, Syria.
