Has the Syrian Government Retaken Aleppo? (Updated)

The New York Times is reporting that rebels in Syria have left the areas of the north-east of the city they occupied and that the Syrian Army is advancing to secure those areas:

BEIRUT, Lebanon — Thousands of people were sent fleeing for their lives on Monday as rebel fighters lost a large swath of territory in the northern Syrian city of Aleppo to government forces and Kurdish fighters, in what could prove to be a turning point in the conflict, both militarily and psychologically.

Residents described desperate scenes of people being killed by shells as they searched for shelter after their homes came under the heaviest bombardment yet in a grinding battle that has destroyed entire neighborhoods of the city, once Syria’s largest and an industrial hub.

At least 4,000 people have been registered with the Syrian Arab Red Crescent in a government-controlled western neighborhood of Aleppo, Jibreen, Jens Laerke, the United Nations humanitarian spokesman, said on Monday.

As the rebels absorbed the harshest blow since they seized more than half the city four years ago, it seemed increasingly likely that President Bashar al-Assad will eventually manage to take back all of Aleppo. That would give the Syrian government control of the country’s five largest cities and most of its more populous west, leaving the rebels fighting Mr. Assad with only the northern province of Idlib and a few isolated pockets of territory in Aleppo and Homs provinces and around the capital, Damascus.

There seems to be some confusion about the direction in which refugees are fleeing. The report above along with others I’ve seen seems to suggest that refugees are fleeing to western Aleppo. That’s towards the Syrian Army not away from it. Other reports say they’re fleeing the Syrian Army.

We’ll probably need to wait for the fog of war to lift before we actually know what’s going on.

Update

The independent news site South Front has noticed the same thing:

According to headlines in the mainstream media, the local population is running from “regime forces”.

Unfortunatelly, they just forgot to mention that locals are running to the “regime-held areas”.

At this point I’ve lost the ability to distinguish the fake news from the real news. The propaganda being dished out by notionally news sites has reached critical mass. A key example of this is that major news outlets seem to think that South Front is a Russian disinformation outlet while South Front seems to think that the major news outlets are dealing out propaganda from the U. S. government.