Syrian opposition says airstrike kills 10 civilians

A senior official in the pro-Damascus military alliance said on Tuesday that Syria and its allies aimed to drive rebels from Aleppo before Donald Trump took office as U.S. President.

Russian Federation says it is not involved in the current offensive in Aleppo, concentrating its strikes instead on rebel and jihadist forces in the northwestern Idlib and central Homs provinces. ABC News looks at the recent developments in the long-embattled city.

Among those who have fled their homes during the latest round of fighting is 7-year-old Bana Alabed.

More than 50,000 people have fled Aleppo’s rebel-held districts, the Observatory said Wednesday, including at least 20,000 to government-held territory and another 30,000 to Kurdish-controlled districts.

Retaking the whole of Aleppo, Syria’s second largest city, is a key aim of the Syrian government. Others wish to see the group aligned to the more mainstream, but militarily weaker, Free Syrian Army.

However, Western countries are exhibiting “surprising blindness” in their evaluation of the Syrian government troops’ ability to achieve progress in Aleppo, the ministry added.

A top Russian diplomat has criticized the Turkish president’s comments about Syrian President Bashar Assad as contradicting all worldwide agreements on Syria.

Part of the area lost by the rebels was taken over by a USA -backed Kurdish militia from another part of Aleppo in what rebels described as an agreed handover, a rare example of cooperation between groups that have fought each other. Why Is There a Turnaround in Aleppo?

They have made rapid territorial gains since entering eastern Aleppo on the ground Saturday, taking a huge portion of the northeast.

The ministry said Monday that government forces are in control of 12 neighborhoods, or roughly 40 percent of the city.

The Kurdish YPG militia which controls the Sheikh Maqsoud district of Aleppo moved into at least two of the areas left by rebel forces.

The lawyers cited Amnesty International reports and individual accounts by asylum-seekers in Germany in arguing that there is overwhelming evidence of multiple atrocities committed by Assad’s forces in Aleppo between April and November.

Up to 16,000 civilians have fled strife-torn parts of eastern Aleppo as the rebels lost all of the northern neighbourhoods of their stronghold, the United Nations said on Tuesday, describing the situation as “chilling”. The holdout by the rebels in eastern Aleppo has served as a rallying cry for other anti-Assad groups that have looked at their resistance as a sign that the Syrian military was vulnerable on the battlefield. The observatory says rebel forces continue to hold about a third of the district.

“Assad’s survival does not promise stability in Syria”, said Lister, who predicts that the collapse of the more moderate rebel elements will embolden the extremists.

USA officials stressed that they haven’t given up, pointing to the negotiations with Russian Federation and several other countries directly or indirectly involved in Syria’s war as evidence of continued diplomatic engagement.

“But we know that Assad regime statements often don’t reflect reality in Syria, so we ask opposition leaders and rebels and activists and residents, why are people still living in this neighborhood when it’s so hard, it’s so unsafe?” But since the Russian air task force and advisers arrived in Syria last fall, the situation has changed.