SYRIAN troops and their allies launched a big push to reimpose the siege on Western-backed al-Qaida terrorists in east Aleppo yesterday.

Lebanon’s Hezbollah, the Iraqi Harakat Al-Nujaba militia and the Palestinian refugee Al-Quds brigade joined forces with the army’s Tiger Forces and Republican Guard in a bid to close the mile-wide breach in the encirclement.

The offensive was launched along four axes in the key Ramouseh district, which has been under heavy aerial and artillery bombardment since the recently renamed Levant Conquest Front — al-Qaida’s Syrian branch — broke through at the weekend.

Jaish Al-Mujahideen faction commander Yousef Za’ou’a was reportedly killed yesterday, the seventh senior insurgent leader to die in the battle.

On Wednesday Russian general staff Chief of Operations Lieutenant General Sergey Rudskoy said al-Qaida and its Western-supplied allies had massed some 7,000 insurgents on Aleppo’s south-western outskirts in their bid to capture the entire city.

He claimed that since Sunday “nearly 1,000 militants were killed and over 2,000 injured.”

On Wednesday night the Syrian army agreed a daily three-hour ceasefire to allow civilians to leave and humanitarian aid to enter east Aleppo, starting yesterday.

However residents in the east of the city reported that fighting had continued despite the ceasefire.

Local resident Wassam Zarqa told the Associated Press: “I’m at home and I don’t dare to leave — the jets are not letting up.”

A few hours after Russia promised the three-hour ceasefire, opposition activists accused Syrian government forces of releasing chlorine gas on the eastern Zabadieh region of the city, leaving at least two people killed.

The UN has announced that it will investigate the accusation however a Syrian military official has denied the attack, claiming that militants fabricated the incident.

Elsewhere yesterday the army displayed two US-made anti-tank missiles captured from al-Qaida terrorists ambushed by troops in Hama province.

Six heavy supersonic bombers flying from Russia blitzed an Islamic State (Isis) chemical weapons factory and training camp in their stronghold city of Raqqa yesterday morning.

In a startling turnaround Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusolgu proposed joint operations with Russia against the “common enemy” of Isis.

North-east of Aleppo the US-backed Kurdish separatist YPG militia retook several villages near Manbij which were lost during an Isis attempt to break the siege of the town on Wednesday.