“Since the beginning of the uprising, this criminal” — a common reference among rebels for President Bashar al-Assad — “transformed these stations into military centers,” said Col. Abdul Jabbar al-Okeidi, the head of the Aleppo military council of the Free Syrian Army, the largest armed resistance group in Syria. “There are no more policemen, just security forces and thugs and snipers.”

Analysts said the Syrian police had generally not been involved in Syria’s 17-month-old conflict, but police stations — as fortified government institutions inside neighborhoods — have become increasingly valuable military locations. Rebels said the Syrian Army had been using jail cells to hold captured rebel fighters, while gathering troops at the stations to stage attacks or fire from the rooftops.

The stations “also represent a source of intelligence and a network for information for the regime as well as a refuge for government officials,” said Elias Hanna, a retired Lebanese general and an expert on the Syrian military. “Taking over a police station means denying the government a presence in the area, and controlling it.”

The battles for the stations appear to have been bloody. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an opposition group based in Britain, described the largest of the two stations as a three-story building occupied by dozens of officers and soldiers who were killed during a battle that lasted seven to eight hours. Colonel Okeidi said that about 50 Syrian soldiers had been captured, including a colonel — an assertion, like the others involving the death toll, that could not be independently verified.