Germany lawyers seek crimes case against Assad

Syrian opposition activists say an airstrike on a neighborhood held by the Islamic State group in an eastern Syrian city has killed at least 17 civilians.

The Syrian Arab Red Crescent registered 4,000 people in the government-held Jibreen district of western Aleppo after they fled the rebel-held east in recent days, the UN’s humanitarian spokesman Jens Laerke said on Monday.

Attorney Mehmet Daimaguler said: “We’re experiencing genocide in Aleppo in slow motion”.

General Konashenkov: “Practically half of the territory occupied by rebels in recent years in the eastern part of Aleppo has been completely liberated”. The government blamed rebels for the attack.

“The bombardment is still heavy”.

Syria’s Kurds are officially aligned with neither the government nor the rebels, but the opposition views them as effectively allied with the regime in its efforts to recapture Aleppo.

An opposition retreat from its last strongholds in Aleppo would give Assad control of Syria’s four largest cities and coastal region, and could prove a devastating psychological blow to a rebellion that has been on the defensive since Russian Federation intervened to help Assad 14 months ago.

After finishing encirclement of rebel-held districts in early September, the president Bashar al-Assad’s troops backed by the Russian air forces, Hezbollah militants and Iranian fighters, launched an operation on retaking the besieged part of the strategically important city. But while their chances of winning the Syrian conflict plummet with a defeat in Aleppo, the war remains far from over.

Eight others were reportedly killed by rockets that hit government-held areas. The footage showed body parts strewn along a road full of debris, and families grieving over the corpses of their relatives as rescue workers attended to them.

Almost 10,000 civilians have fled the east, the Observatory said late Sunday, with about 6,000 moving to the Kurdish-held Sheikh Maqsud neighbourhood and 4,000 to government-held west Aleppo.

Civilians were also fleeing south to the remaining districts held by the rebels, arriving with little more than the clothes they were wearing, an Agence France-Presse correspondent said.

There’s been minimal resistance from rebels, several civilians on the ground said. “We are deeply concerned about the impact of the fighting on the civilian population in Aleppo”.

“The rebels have lost at least 30 percent of the territory they once controlled in Aleppo”, Observatory chief Rami Abdel Rahman said.

The fighting has forced thousands of residents of eastern Aleppo to flee.

Thousands of residents were reported to have fled.

At least 120 British MPs have backed a petition calling for the UK Government to carry out aid drops over eastern Aleppo. “Many people are escaping to government areas”, she said, rushing back to her patient in labor, in one of the few functioning clinics in the enclave.

The United Nations has a plan to deliver aid to Aleppo and evacuate the sick and wounded, which rebel factions have approved but which Damascus has not yet agreed.

The official who declined to be identified in order to speak freely indicated however that the next phase of the Aleppo campaign could be more hard as the army and its allies seek to capture more densely populated areas of the city.

The Observatory says almost 300 civilians, including 33 children, have been killed in east Aleppo since the latest government assault began on November 15.

“Pounded by accelerating bombardment, deliberately deprived of food and medical care, many of them – including small children – report that they are simply waiting for death”, he said”.

The London-based human rights group warned in a statement Monday of the potential for revenge attacks, arbitrary detention, torture, harassment, and kidnappings against people formerly living under opposition control. The reports could not be independently confirmed.

Saleh Muslim, joint head of the Syrian Kurdish PYD party, told Reuters that between 6,000 to 10,000 people had fled to Sheikh Maqsoud, where they were being received. The UN says up to 16,000 have been displaced by the government advances.