Geneva: Russia said on Thursday it would support a 48-hour ceasefire in Aleppo, a move the U.N. Syria envoy said would allow aid to reach besieged areas soon, as long as all sides respect the temporary truce. The country took sides with the USA and Saudi Arabia in rearing opposition groups in Syria, but now voices a position that is more like that of Tehran and Moscow.
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A doctor in Aleppo identified the child as Omran Daqneesh. Moscow instead said the bombing was carried out by Syrian rebels seeking to overthrow the Assad regime.
Dazed and expressionless, barefoot and dressed in dirty shorts and a cartoon-character T-shirt, Omran is seen reaching up his hand to his blood-covered face. His parents and three siblings survived the attack.
Omran Daqneesh, the five-year-old Syrian boy who was injured and separated from his parents during an airstrike on August 18, has finally been reunited with his mother and father.
The EU today called for an “immediate halt” to fighting, as the United Nations said aid was not reaching the besieged residents desperate for food and care.
Humanitarian aid could be sent from Turkey’s Gaziantep to the eastern parts of Aleppo or from Syria’s Handarat to western Aleppo, both via the Castello road, the Russian official said.
Some two million people on both sides of the divided city have been without running water for almost two weeks after infrastructure was damaged by bombing earlier this month.
Aleppo, Syria’s most populous pre-war city and once its commercial hub, has become the focus of fighting in the five-year-old war.
Early this month, opposition forces broke through government encirclement of the city in the south to threaten government-held western Aleppo, where up to 2 million civilians live.
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The United Nations envoy for Syria abruptly suspended the regular worldwide humanitarian taskforce meeting in Geneva today shortly after it started, saying it made no sense ” to continue unless there is a pause in the fighting so aid convoys could reach besieged areas of the war-ravaged country.
