On Turkish side of border, Syrian refugees wait and worry

The UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said on Friday it estimated “up to 20,000 people have gathered at the Bab al-Salama border crossing and another 5,000 to 10,000 people have been displaced to Azaz city” nearby.

Aleppo would be a major strategic coup for the Syrian government, which lost control of the city to groups such as the Free Syrian Army and the Islamic Front soon after the civil war began.

The coordinator told reporters after the Syria peace talks were put on hold on Wednesday that peace can’t be done with the presence of Bashar al-Assad and with the foreign forces meddling.

Aleppo city, Syria’s former economic powerhouse, has been divided between opposition control in the east and regime control in the west since mid-2012.

The battles prompted tens of thousands of people to flee their homes, a lot of them to escape intense airstrikes that have reduced entire villages to rubble, according to rebel fighters and activists in the area.

“We can not afford to be pessimistic”, Churkin said.

“The regime is now trying to expand the area it has taken control of…”

“This has to stop”.

NATO’s secretary general says that Russian airstrikes in Syria that mainly target opposition forces are “undermining efforts to find a political solution to the conflict”.

On Friday, a special session of the Security Council heard from the UN Special Envoy for Syria, Staffan de Mistura.

The surge in fighting contributed to the collapse of peace talks in Geneva this week and has focused growing criticism among Western allies on the role of Russian Federation in fueling a war it had said it was seeking to solve.

March 2011: Anti-government protests erupt across Syria, but Aleppo is initially untouched as a result of a state crackdown.

French Ambassador Francois Delattre said the opposition couldn’t be expected to negotiate “with a gun to their heads”, and British Ambassador Matthew Rycroft said Churkin “needs to look in the mirror and understand where the responsibility lies”.

Syria’s Foreign Minister Walid al-Moallem meanwhile said government forces were “on track to end the conflict” following the recent gains around Aleppo.

The officials said the more migrants would be allowed into Turkey in the coming days.

“On the one hand, the Syrian regime claims to discuss peace in Geneva, and on the other hand, it intensifies its military offensive against opposition groups with which it is supposed to discuss”, said Delattre.

The increasing civilian casualties under the Russian raids in Aleppo caused a state of panic among the residents of Syria’s most populated province.

But Sherif Elsayed-Ali, deputy director of global issues at Amnesty International, said: “Turkey must not close its doors to people in desperate need of safety”. “We are in difficulty because of the cold”. ISIS was “weakening operationally and tactically”, Ryder said, as “several layers of pressure are being applied to them”.

Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said up to 70,000 might be heading to the border following a Russian bombardment.

She said another 10,000 people were thought to have been displaced to the Kurdish town of Afrin, also in northern Aleppo province.

Video footage showed thousands of people, mostly women, children and the elderly, massing at the Bab al-Salam border crossing.

About 120 fighters on both sides were killed around the town of Ratyan, north of Aleppo, on Friday, the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said. There are already between 30,000 and 35,000 displaced Syrians on the Syrian side of the border being cared for by Turkey.

Erdogan, who has cast the newspaper’s coverage as part of an attempt to undermine Turkey’s global standing, has said he will not forgive such reporting. Associated Press writers Zeina Karam in Beirut, Bassem Mroue in Geneva and Edith M. Lederer at the United Nations contributed reporting.