Refugees fleeing Aleppo ‘detained by government’

The Observatory reported that regime forces were detaining and questioning hundreds of those fleeing rebel-held areas for the comparative safety of regime-controlled districts.

Artillery by government forces and air strikes killed more than 300 people in rebel-held east Aleppo in the past two weeks, the observatory said.

She also voiced concern that civilians believed to have links to armed opposition groups could be detained once they reach government or Kurdish-controlled areas.

The forces of President Assad and his military allies are taking back rebel-held parts of the city, forcing thousands more people to abandon what was left of their homes. “Many received for the first time water, food, medical care from Russian humanitarian centres”, he stressed.

But it has failed to secure agreement from the government, even as the army’s siege has led to dwindling food supplies and the exhaustion of global aid provisions in the east.

On the backdrop of this surge in hostilities in Aleppo, the UN Security Council announced an emergency meeting to take place on Wednesday.

“The intensity of attacks on eastern Aleppo neighbourhoods over the past few days has forced thousands of civilians to flee to other parts of the city”, United Nations humanitarian chief Stephen O´Brien said in a statement.

Rudskoi said there are more than 90,000 civilians in those districts.

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

“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 United States policy towards the war in Syria.

ICRC spokeswoman Krista Armstrong said the figure was an estimate and the situation remained fluid as “people are fleeing in different directions”.

“Our priority now is to get to all people in need”.

This photo provided by the Syrian Civil Defence, which has been authenticated based on its contents and AP reporting, shows workers carrying a victim on a stretcher after artillery fire in the Jub al-Quba district Wednesday.

Fear of arrest and interrogation by the army or Syria’s infamous mukhabarat, or secret police, has always been one of the major factors stopping the 250,000 people trapped inside east Aleppo from leaving, despite regime and Russian Federation exhortations it is safe do so.

Many residents have chosen to stay in eastern Aleppo rather than flee to government areas out of fear of arrest by the government’s security services.

Russian Federation and Syria are preventing essential humanitarian aid from reaching starving, sick civilians in east Aleppo, according to the United Nations.

The two officials, speaking from Turkey, said the new alliance would be called the “Aleppo Army” and led by the commander of the Jabha Shamiya rebel faction, known as the Levant Front in English and one of the major groups fighting in northern Syria under the Free Syrian Army banner.

The violence in the city has prompted global concern, though there has been little sign of a plan to intervene.