Up To 20000 Syrians Mass On Turkish Border

The bombardment has also interrupted U.N.-led peace talks scheduled in Geneva this week.

Amnesty’s Global Issues Director Sherif Elsayed-Ali said Turkey “must not close its doors to people in desperate need of safety”. Ankara said it suspected the aim was to starve the population into submission.

Videos published by local news outlets and activist groups and verified by Storyful show huge groups of panicked Syrians carrying bags of grain and personal items to the Bab al-Salam border crossing, just north of the town of Azaz. Some women sat on the side of the road holding babies and awaited to be allowed into Turkey.

Aleppo province is one of the main strongholds of Syria’s opposition, which is facing possibly its worst moment since the country’s brutal conflict began.

“The situation in Aleppo is a humanitarian catastrophe”, said an opposition spokesman still in Geneva after the ill-fated peace talks.

SANA and the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights say troops captured the village of Rityan on Friday.

Syrian refugees are streaming out of Aleppo in a march toward Turkey, fleeing the intense fighting. The city, Syria’s former commercial center, has been carved up between government and rebel-held districts since the summer of 2012.

This combined force also seized control of the Azaz Corridor, Aleppo’s outlet to the Turkish border, thereby cutting of the rebels’ supply lines from that city and the entire northern province of Idlib. Government-allied forces and militias, including Hezbollah, are responsible for besieging hundreds of thousands of Syrians across the country.

Iranian news agencies said Friday that one of the Islamic Republic’s generals had been killed in the assault of the city.

Since Wednesday, the organization’s operations in northern Syria have effectively been cut in half, the group said. Russian airstrikes have been seen as instrumental in achieving this. Russia’s intervention has tipped the war President Bashar al-Assad’s way, reversing gains the rebels made a year ago.

“The regime is beginning to reap the rewards of the Russian campaign and its advance in Aleppo is all the more important because it has suffered setback after setback in the past two years”, Mr Abdel Rahman said.

Top diplomats from countries trying to resolve the conflict are set to meet again on February 11 after UN-brokered peace talks in Geneva collapsed this week. Russia, he added, could not stop bombings “unilaterally”.

Syria’s Foreign Minister said on Saturday that there could be no ceasefire until both Turkey and Jordan have closed their borders with Syria.

Russian Federation has accused Turkey of preparing a military incursion into northern Syria.

The Russian bombing campaign, meanwhile, drew new criticism from the West, which has sharply criticized Moscow for its military support of Assad.

But France’s U.N. Ambassador Francois Delatte said the opposition couldn’t be expected to negotiate “with a gun to their heads”. It’s a branch of Al-Qaeda.

“What about the terrorists and the opposition groups? But, on the contrary, they were disappointed and left negotiations”. However, critics say Russian warplanes have struck a wide range of opposition targets in order to bolster Assad, a longtime ally.