Fighting between government forces and rebels in Aleppo has intensified in the past month, with both sides sending in reinforcements.
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While commending Russia’s willingness to consider a three-hour pause in military action in Aleppo, the USA supports the U.N.’s call for a long-term cease-fire.
“We need 48 hours; that’s how we see it now and we want to sit down with the Russian side”, he said. “To meet that capacity of need you need two (road) lanes and you need to have about 48 hours to get sufficient trucks in”.
The UN’s Syria envoy, Staffan de Mistura, praised Thursday the recent Turkey-Russia rapprochement which could help solve ongoing crisis in the war-torn country.
United Nations special envoy for Syria, Staffan de Mistura, has said there is a “lot of evidence” a gas attack occurred, adding that if it is confirmed it would constitute a war crime.
The United Nations said Russian Federation was considering expanding three-hour pauses in fighting every morning to bring in desperately-needed aid.
An anonymous official from Syrian President Bashar Assad’s government dismissed the allegations of a chlorine attack as fabrications by the rebel forces.
The monitor said it had not yet confirmed how numerous remaining six people killed were civilians or DAESH militants. The Syrian government and Russian Federation have previously denied targeting medical facilities.
“We are 15 of the last doctors serving the remaining 300,000 citizens of eastern Aleppo”, a group of doctors claiming to be among the last in the city wrote in a letter to U.S. president Barack Obama on Thursday.
The Syrian-American Medical Society estimates that nearly 1,500 people have been killed in chemical weapons attacks since civil war broke out five years ago.
Even as Moscow pledged to pause strikes on rebel-held areas of the city, it carried out raids farther east on the ISIL bastion of Raqqa that killed 24 civilians, according to a monitoring group. The group said a security building and a water pumping station were hit in the city, among other targets.
The offer by Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu to coordinate with Russia on operations against IS followed a meeting between the Russian and Turkish leaders earlier this week in which they agreed to mend ties.
Two weeks ago Russian Federation and the Syrian government declared a joint humanitarian operation for the besieged area, showering it with leaflets telling fighters to surrender and civilians to leave through a number of “humanitarian corridors” it had set up. “We said we have a common enemy which we can struggle against together”. Daesh is an Arabic language acronym for the Islamic State group.
The gas is thought to have been chlorine dropped in a barrel bomb, said the Syrian Civil Defence – volunteer emergency response workers who operate in opposition-held areas.
A US-Russian brokered deal in 2013 saw Syria cave in to global pressure to hand over its chemical stockpile for destruction, after a sarin gas attack in August that year that was blamed by the West and the opposition on Assad’s regime.
Several people have died and many children injured when a gas, believed to be chlorine, was dropped with bombs in Aleppo.
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The Observatory made no mention of chlorine gas.
