A homemade armored vehicle, resembling a miniature of the huge treaded Sandcrawler fortresses in Star Wars, was seen in the Dahiyat al-Assad outskirts of Syria's Aleppo province on Friday.
The armored vehicle is only one of the many homemade weapons of the Syrian opposition, devised in deprivation and lack of professional equipment due to an ongoing vicious civil war that started in 2011.
A sandcrawler from Star Wars Episode IV (Photo courtesy of starwars.com)
The opposition launched a major offensive on Aleppo on Friday, to break the siege of the Assad regime, which cut supply lines to the city.
More than 250,000 people live in the bombed-out eastern parts of Aleppo, encircled by government troops and allied militia since July without access to food or humanitarian aid.
"In just a few days, we will open the way for our besieged brothers," opposition commander Abu Mustafa told AFP on Saturday from the frontline district of Dahiyet al-Assad.
He said advancing fighters would work their way east through a sprawling military complex then to the district of Al-Hamdaniyeh to break through the regime's lines.
Syria's second biggest city, Aleppo, has become the top strategic point that will determine Syria's fate, as opposition groups in and around Aleppo have been preparing to launch a counter-offensive to try and break Assad's suffocating siege off Aleppo's eastern-held neighborhoods for several weeks.
According to local sources in Aleppo, Russian jets launched over 30 airstrikes in two hours on Friday, targeting opposition-held areas between the village of Khan Touman and the provincial capital.
The area has been subjected to a ferocious campaign of aerial attacks by Russian and Syrian regime warplanes, and hundreds of people have been killed in recent weeks according to opposition activists and trapped residents.
Assad has said he is determined to retake the country's former commercial capital. His forces have maintained a siege on the opposition-held eastern quarters since September.
Syria has been locked in a vicious civil war since early 2011, when the regime cracked down on pro-democracy protests erupting as part of the "Arab Spring" uprisings with unexpected ferocity.
Since then, more than a quarter of a million people have been killed and more than 10 million displaced across the war-torn country, according to UN figures.
