Artillery barrage kills many displaced in Aleppo

As the government advanced, more than 50 000 people had left rebel-held districts, the Observatory said yesterday.

About 30,000 people are receiving aid after fleeing the besieged eastern zone of the Syrian city of Aleppo in the past few days, taking the total number of displaced people in the city to 400,000, United Nations special envoy Staffan de Mistura said on Thursday.

According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), another 700,000 people are in other besieged areas across the country, mostly in rural Damascus surrounded by Government forces.

Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Maj.

“The Russians want to complete the operation before Trump takes power”, said the official, repeating a previous timetable which pro-Damascus sources had said was drawn up to mitigate the risks of any shift in USA policy towards the war in Syria. Images published by the Civil Defense showed bodies strewn on a debris-filled road in an attack they It blamed on Bashar al-Assad forces. At one point, a warplane roamed overhead.

OCHA says a total of 26,500 people fled to government-held Jibreen, east of Aleppo, and Kurdish-held Sheikh Maqsoud.

The besieged rebel-held areas have suffered a sustained campaign of indiscriminate shelling with Assad army launching a final offensive to crash the opposition before the new United States administration takes office.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, on a visit to Turkey, said Moscow had used every opportunity to help civilians, but accused rebels of threatening “to prevent passage of humanitarian convoys and fire on them”. He called the situation in Aleppo “deeply alarming and chilling”.

There are also hundreds of thousands of civilians trapped inside eastern Aleppo. “The Syrian regime does not tolerate any form of opposition to its narrative, and this means that leaving eastern Aleppo through “safe” passageways that have been set up by Assad’s forces is not an option for the vast majority of the population”.

On Sunday and Monday the city’s rebels suffered their biggest reverse in four years, losing around a third of the area they had controlled.

The Syrian government has been keen to show it is restoring normalcy to the shell-shocked community following the swift restoration of government control to areas held by the opposition for four years. “They called it a death trip”. The London-based human rights group warned of the potential for revenge attacks, arbitrary detention and torture against people formerly living under opposition control.

In a statement, the coalition said it aimed “to save Aleppo and its people”. He said the government is now assessing where to relocate the thousands of displaced, including in areas recently captured from the rebels. Violence that has displaced about 20,000 people in recent weeks.

He said the warring sides in the conflict had “systematically disregarded” the laws of war, willing to do anything to gain military advantage. There have been no operational hospitals in eastern Aleppo for almost two weeks after they were bombed.