Thousands of Syrian refugees gathered near the Turkish border Friday in an attempt to flee the ongoing fighting in northern Aleppo province as government forces gain on rebel-held territory. The charity runs about 10 camps for displaced Syrians along the frontier.
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Robert Ford, a veteran diplomat and former ambassador to Syria, told the U.S. House Armed Services Committee last month that Moscow’s intervention has made it “infinitely harder to get the concessions needed from the outside of the table” for any talks to succeed.
Tens of thousands of civilians are reported to have joined the exodus after fierce fighting by advancing government forces who severed the rebels’ main supply route into Syria’s second city. The Observatory says the capture was backed by shelling and airstrikes, including by Russian warplanes.
Walid Muallim, speaking to the Reuters news agency, said that “caravans of terrorists” were continuing to cross into Syria from Jordan and Turkey, its neighbours to the south and north respectively, and that a ceasefire could not be considered until after the borders are closed.
On Friday, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said the airstrikes that mainly target opposition forces are ‘undermining efforts to find a political solution to the conflict’.
But Syrian opposition leaders said Turkish officials told them they would not open the border gates, fearing that most of Aleppo’s panicked residents would enter.
Aleppo, Syria’s commercial hub, has been divided for years between a section under government control and areas in the grip of rebels.
Monitoring group the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said about 120 fighters on both sides had been killed around the town of Ratyan on Friday.
More than 250,000 Syrians have been killed and a million injured. We have received already more than 5,000 of them.
But the civil war has damaged its landmarks, including the 11th century Umayyad Mosque, which had a minaret collapse during fighting in 2012, the 13th century citadel and the medieval marketplace, where fire damaged more than 500 shops in its narrow, vaulted passageways. But air strikes have also hit the rebels opposed to Assad.
Meanwhile, the United Nations Syria envoy, Staffan de Mistura, said he is trying to gauge whether there is worldwide support, chiefly from the United States, Russia and Iran, for resuming the peace talks he had started this week in Geneva only to quickly halt the contentious gathering until late February.
State TV says Gen. Mohsen Ghajarian and five others were killed in northern Syria while battling the Islamic State group and Syrian rebels. The opposition refused to negotiate while Russian Federation was escalating its bombing and government troops were advancing.
A Saudi official said Wednesday that the kingdom would consider sending troops to Syria to fight the Islamic State, but it appeared he had spoken without consulting with regional allies, and it was not clear what kind of deployment he meant or where it would be.
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But tensions between them remain, with Moscow on Thursday accusing key opposition backer Ankara of actively preparing to invade Syria, a claim Erdogan dismissed Friday as “laughable”.
