Airport type Military In use Unknown-present 8,300 (est.) 2,500 (est.) | Operator Syrian Air Force 00/00 8,300 (est.) Owner Syrian Armed Forces | |
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Location Kuweires Sharqi, Aleppo Governorate | ||
The Kuweires Military Airbase is an airbase in Aleppo Governorate, Syria. It is situated some 30kms east of Aleppo, to the northeast of Kuweires Sharqi, between As-Safira in the West and Dayr Hafir in the East.
The base was constructed with Polish support in the late 1960s as the primary base of the Syrian air force academy.
Siege during the Syrian Civil War
Kuweires Airbase was defended mostly by cadets when it fell under siege by rebels in 2013. Rebel forces surrounded Kuweiris for more than a year but did not overrun it. As rebel infighting with ISIS intensified, ISIS took control of the siege around late 2013. ISIS besieged the airbase for two years, deploying heavy weapons and armored vehicles like suicide tank VBIEDs. ISIS negotiators called up officers on the phone and urged them to surrender and shelled the base with leaflets promising safe passage, but no one defected. Twice ISIS breached the perimeter of the airbase, even reaching as far as the hardened aircraft shelters where the defenders lived, but could not capture it.
Colonel Suheil al-Hassan and his Tiger Forces finally broke the siege on November 10, 2015 as part of the Kuweires offensive. Only 300 of 1,100 soldiers survived the siege.
The Syrian regime repaired the base immediately after lifiting the siege, deploying a squadron of Aero L-39 Albatros fighter-bombers together with a Buk M1 surface-to-air missile system —operated by a combined Russian and Syrian crew— to defend the base.
