A siege imposed by the Syrian regime on the northern city of Aleppo coupled with an uptick in airstrikes and closure of hospitals are leaving the city at the risk of a humanitarian catastrophe.
Advertisement
Britain’s U.N. Ambassador Matthew Rycroft says he received an email Monday morning from a doctor at Aleppo Children’s Hospital saying “if nothing is done we are surely facing death”.
And state news agency SANA carried a call from the military urging residents of eastern Aleppo to “join the national reconciliation and expel the foreign mercenaries” from their neighbourhoods.
A two-day-old baby in a children’s hospital was killed after his oxygen supply was cut off during an air raid early on July 24, the group said.
“After the second strike, we had to move him (the baby) downstairs to the bomb shelter, and that’s why he died”, said Malika, the hospital’s head nurse.
Earlier this month, regime forces and allied militias established fire control over the last road leading into east Aleppo, effectively transforming the 64 rebel-held districts, with a combined population of 300,000 people, into one of the most densely populated besieged areas in Syria.
The blood bank of Aleppo, Syria, was also bombed during the night and is no longer in working order.
It was the second strike on the same hospital in about nine hours, according to the IDA. A caption read that the hospital was subjected to “more than one airstrike by warplanes causing wide damage and completely putting the hospital out of service until further notice”.
Medical workers on the ground tell Syria Direct that the pace of regime attacks against hospitals increased both during and after the Russian-backed offensive to encircle the city that began in late May.
United Nations aid chief Stephen O’Brien branded the siege on rebel-held parts of Aleppo as “medieval and shameful”, and called for weekly 48-hour humanitarian truces to prevent it from taking hold.
Asked about the al-Tukhar raids, the US-led coalition said it had recently “conducted air strikes near Manbij” and was looking into the reports of civilian casualties.
The Syrian uprising started with largely unarmed protests against President Bashar al-Assad in March 2011, but it quickly turned into a full-blown civil war that has since continued unabated.
Secretary of State John Kerry said this month that Washington and Damascus ally Moscow had reached a common understanding on the steps needed to get Syria’s peace process back on track.
It reported at least five SDF fighters and 18 ISIS militants killed, as well as 8 civilians.
Terrorist groups such as Daesh, as well as Jabhat al-Nusra Front, both outlawed in Russian Federation and a range of other states, are not part of the deal.
The UN’s Syrian peace envoy, Staffan de Mistura, is due to discuss the plan in talks with Russian and the USA in Geneva on Tuesday.
Advertisement
It reported at least five SDF fighters and 18 IS militants killed, as well as eight civilians trying to flee Manbij.
