SANA added that “armed men from eastern neighbourhoods of Aleppo” turned themselves over to army soldiers in Salaheddin district, without specifying a number, or giving further details.
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Also on Saturday, the Syrian Observatory for Human rights, a UK-based activist group, reported government air strikes on two rebel-held areas on the outskirts of Aleppo.
Rights groups and civilians trapped in opposition-held neighborhoods in eastern Aleppo have reacted critically to Russia’s plan, saying it does not guarantee safe passage or give residents a choice of where they flee to.
An Agence France Presse correspondent in east Aleppo said streets were empty with residents holed up indoors and shops shuttered.
“In Aleppo, getting civilians to leave would both serve its propaganda and its military objectives”, said Emile Hokayem, senior fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies.
The government completely closed the main road into the rebel-held parts of Aleppo on July 17.
But the humanitarian corridors announced by Russian Federation have been met with suspicion by residents, as well as countries, including the US.
The Kurdish-led forces were able to evacuate another 1,000 civilians from Manbij on Thursday, according to Mustafa Bali, a local media activist living in the town of Kobani.
A unidentified man interviewed by Al Jazeera said what the government was doing was opening up a “corridor of death”.
“The humanitarian situation is more and more desperate and it’s hard to find food”, he added.
The capitulation took place in Aleppo’s Salaheddine neighborhood on Saturday.
In comments carried later Friday by Russia’s Interfax news agency, Deputy Defense Minister Anatoly Antonov said that Russian Federation was willing to work with the United Nations on setting up the corridors.
The UN voiced support for the humanitarian corridors, but UN’s Syria envoy Staffan de Mistura urged that the worldwide body take charge of the passages. The bombings came a week after airstrikes, also blamed by Syrian activists on USA aircraft, killed at least 56 civilians in ISIS-held territory in northern Syria.
Aleppo, Syria’s biggest city before the war, has been divided since 2012 into government and rebel sectors.
How do you expect convoys of humanitarian aid to actually reach those people if there is shelling and bombing from the air and from the ground, de Mistura emphasized.
Analyst Karim Bitar from the French think-tank IRIS, also said residents of the east faced “a awful existential dilemma… between risking starvation or risking to die while fleeing”.
The fate of Aleppo in the coming weeks has the potential to be a turning point in a seemingly endless, multisided civil war that has killed hundreds of thousands of people, driven millions from their homes and drawn in most world and regional powers.
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More than 280,000 people have been killed in Syria’s war which erupted in 2011 with a brutal crackdown on anti-government protests before becoming a complex conflict involving many groups, including jihadists.
