In the “Afghan sector” near Khan Tuman southwest of the city, Dari is spoken, a dialect of Persian common in Afghanistan, Yazen says. In the “Hezbollah sector” in the south, Arabic with a Lebanese accent can be heard. The Iranian officers, meanwhile, speak Persian. And nobody, the scout continues, understands the Pakistanis when they speak Urdu. He says that the Iraqi militias surrounding Aleppo tend to speak with the strong accent prevalent in southern Iraq, “but we’ve gotten used to it.” The only reason they don’t hear much Russian, he says, is because the pilots flying overhead “only use frequencies that are difficult for us to intercept.”

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