Kerry and Lavrov discuss Aleppo as fighting rages

The government-owned al-Ikhbariya TV showed civilians on foot and at least one bus snaking through the Ballour crossing, and said they were coming from the Saleheen, Fardous and Sheikh Saeed neighborhoods in the southern part of eastern Aleppo.

The advance came as Moscow and Washington traded barbs over stalled efforts to end fighting in the city, where forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad have made significant advances since last week.

Meanwhile, the Russian Defense Ministry said a Russian colonel who worked as a military adviser in the government-controlled part of Aleppo has died in rebel shelling.

Women walk near damaged buildings in rebel-held besieged old Aleppo, Syria December 2, 2016.

“There has to be a pause”, said Jan Egeland, head of the UN-backed humanitarian task force for Syria, pointing out that civilians had little chance of escaping the besieged part of eastern Aleppo.

The United Nations is also deeply concerned for the fate of about 150 activists still in rebel-held areas of Aleppo, Colville said, “given the bad record of arbitrary detention, torture and enforced disappearances by the Syrian government”.

Family members say they lost contact with the missing men, aged 30 to 50, after they fled as Syrian army troops pushed into rebel-held neighborhoods 10 days or a week ago, Colville said.

He said these agreements had protected Syrian civilians and infrastructure and allowed former rebels to “return to the bosom of the state”.

Deeply divided since 2012 between Syrian government and rebel-controlled areas, more than three quarters of the rebel section have now fallen under the government’s control, including the symbolically important ancient Aleppo quarters. Overnight, Syrian soldiers helped residents evacuate newly recaptured areas near the Old City, with evacuees huddling into buses.

Inside one bus, evacuees could be seen huddling together, a baby wrapped in heavy blankets fast asleep at his mother’s feet as she sat waiting for the vehicle to leave.

“The Americans in particular are insisting on demanding a truce, because their terrorist agents are now in a hard situation”, Assad told Al-Watan. “It is for the Russians to leave”, he told AFP. “The gunmen were using us to protect themselves… but then the army came and we were able to leave”.

Kerry said the two would meet again Thursday morning.

Kerry, taking part in his last North Atlantic Treaty Organisation foreign ministers meeting in Brussels on Tuesday, said he would work for a relaunch of peace talks between the Syrian regime and the opposition with the help of President Bashar al-Assad’s ally Russian Federation.

Russian Federation has been flying air raids in Syria since September 2015 and has provided longtime ally Assad’s forces with other military support during the more than five-year-old war that has killed at least 250,000 people.

As the United States and Russian Federation prepare talks on the prospect of a full rebel withdrawal from Aleppo, the militants themselves are at loggerheads over what to do next.

“Even by Syrian standards, the recent bombardment and shelling have been the most intense in Aleppo”, Hanaa Singer, UNICEF’s representative in Syria, said in an emailed statement Wednesday.

“I can tell you that today combat operations by the Syrian army have been halted in eastern Aleppo because there is a large operation underway to evacuate civilians”, said Sergei Lavrov.