Assad presses on in Aleppo, attacks kill civilians

He said there is no properly functioning hospital in eastern Aleppo, which has been under siege for almost 150 days and that most of the almost quarter million people trapped there don’t have the means to survive much longer.

Up to 20,000 people have fled the regime offensive in the past 72 hours, the International Committee of the Red Cross said.

Once Syria’s largest city and its industrial and commercial hubs, much of Allepo now is reduced to ruins as a result of a four-year war with the government forces controlling the eastern part and the rebels the west.

During Prime Minister’s Questions, SNP deputy Angus Robertson described the situation in Aleppo as “descending into hell”, adding it could constitute the biggest massacre of civilians since the Second World War.

The United Nations has food for 150,000 people ready in western Aleppo but it still can not reach roughly 200,000 who remain in the enclave, where food stocks have run out and surgery is being done in basements without anaesthetic, he said.

The UN Security Council held an emergency meeting on the humanitarian crisis in NY yesterday.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a British-based war monitor, said the weather impeded aerial bombardment of rebel-held areas on Thursday, but artillery shelling continued. The United Nations’ convoy plan for December has not yet been approved by the government, Egeland said. “[Washington] is completely shut out of these talks, and doesn’t even know what’s going on in Ankara”, said one opposition figure who asked not to be identified.

“People here are desperate”. Moscow considers all opposition rebel groups as terrorists, while Washington has supported and armed some of the same groups. They want to be there, and they are proud of them. The Russian side implements the fitting out of field hospitals, according to indications of the president of that country, Vladimir Putin, and after the appropriate coordination with the Syrian government, indicated the sources.

Previous attempts by the United States and Russian Federation to broker a lasting ceasefire in the Syrian conflict have failed. “Currently, surgeries are carried on limbs without any anesthesia” because they are saving them for injuries near the heart and abdomen, he said.

Many have chosen to go from the east to neighbourhoods held by Kurdish forces, which are officially aligned with neither the regime nor rebels, such as Sheikh Maqsud in the city’s north. They have seized control of a huge portion of the northeast. Rebels said that the regime’s advance had been repelled. Their gains drive a wedge through the zone and split it into two sections.

Many others have travelled south into the remaining territory held by rebels.

Approximately 400,000 people have died in the Syrian conflict to date, the United Nations estimates, with more than half of the country’s population driven from their homes.