De Mistura said the ceasefire issue had been discussed extensively at the weekly meeting of the UN-backed humanitarian taskforce for Syria and Russian Federation had voiced its willingness to expand the pause.
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A senior United Nations humanitarian official, Jan Egeland, said the three-hour Russian offer of a daily truce in Aleppo “is really nothing”.
The Russian announcement appears more strategic than humanitarian, said Mark Katz, a Russia expert at George Mason University in Washington.
“Urgently needed items could be delivered “within 24-48 hours if we have safe access”, he said, adding that there must be a fully fledged ceasefire or, “at minimum”, 48-hour humanitarian pauses”.
“If it did take place, it is a war crime and as such it would require everyone? to address it immediately”, he was quoted as saying.
“There is a lot of evidence that it actually did take place”, de Mistura told reporters, adding that if confirmed the attack would amount to a war crime.
An upsurge of intense fighting around Aleppo has killed scores of Syrians in the past weeks, displaced thousands and cut water and power to up to people on both sides of the front line, worsening the already dire conditions faced by hundreds of thousands in the city.
A young girl suffering the effects of a suspected gas attack in Aleppo this week. Dr. Mohammed Sahloul, the former president of the Syrian American Medical Society, said during an on camera interview in the film.
“Right now, there is an an attack on a medical facility every 17 hours”, the letter said.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a war monitor, said helicopters dropped explosive barrels on the neighbourhoods of Seif al Dawla and Zubdiya, leading to the death of a woman and her child from suffocation. The arrival of more troops suggests “a total war“, he said.
Turkey on Thursday called on Russian Federation to carry out joint operations against Islamic State (IS) in Syria, after crucial talks between President Vladimir Putin and Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan aimed at ending a diplomatic crisis. “We said we have a common enemy which we can struggle against together”, he said.
“This attack in Aleppo is yet another flagrant violation of worldwide humanitarian law and signals a distressing pattern in the use of chemical weapons by regime forces”, said Magdalena Mughrabi, Amnesty International’s Deputy Director of the Middle East and North Africa Programme.
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.
Rebels said the attack – which reportedly left four people dead and many injured – was carried out by government forces using chlorine gas. At least four barrel bombs were dropped late Wednesday on the city’s eastern Zabadieh neighborhood, one of which purportedly released the chlorine gas.
Cavusoglu also announced that his country will resume its airstrikes against IS targets in Syria, months after they were suspended amid a major row with Moscow.
Speaking to ARA News, YPG official Meer Abass said that the recent improvement in the Turkish-Russian relations “will lead to a weakening of the Syrian opposition groups”.
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The UN said on Thursday it was talking to Russian Federation about a “workable humanitarian pause” in fighting in Aleppo and that three hours a day was “not enough” to help up to 2-million civilians trapped in the divided Syrian city.
