Almost two weeks after a tenuous ceasefire was declared in Syria, Russian and Syrian government warplanes on Saturday pounded rebel-held territory with a barrage of airstrikes in the embattled city of Aleppo.
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Western countries and global aid organizations say they fear for the lives of more than 250,000 people civilians believed to be trapped in the rebel-held zone of Aleppo, Syria’s biggest city, divided into opposition and government sectors for years.
Residents and activists described the use of a missile that produced earthquake-like tremors upon impact and razed buildings down to basement level, where many residents desperately seek protection during bombing.
A senior official in an Aleppo based rebel faction, the Levant Front, said the weapons appeared created to bring down entire buildings.
The British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said at least 33 people were killed, including some children.
The rebels and the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring body described raids by sophisticated jets that they said must belong to Russian Federation.
The Syrian army says it is determined to retake rebel-held areas in Aleppo, after a ceasefire collapsed on Monday.
Hanaa Singer, UNICEF representative in Syria, said intense attacks damaged the Bab al-Nairab station that supplies some 250,000 people in rebel-held eastern parts of the contested city with water.
Almost two million civilians were without water in the devastated northern city after regime bombardment damaged a pumping station and rebels shut down another in retaliation, the United Nations said.
He added that this could be “catastrophic” for residents who have to resort to contaminated water and will be at risk from water-borne diseases. “There are still many under the rubble and we continue to pull them out”, he said.
We feel the earth trembling and shaking under our feet.
It said several of its own headquarters have been targeted.
Justin Forsyth, the deputy director of the United Nations, said to the BBC: “Aleppo is slowly dying, and the world is watching, and the water is being cut off and bombed – it’s just the latest act of inhumanity”.
One White Helmet volunteer reported air strikes as he gave an interview to the BBC World Service.
The White Helmets posted photos on Twitter showing piles of rubble and shattered rescue vehicles.
A Syrian man checks the damage following an air strike in the rebel-held Ansari district in the northern Syrian city of Aleppo on September 23, 2016. It included a nationwide truce, improved humanitarian aid access and the possibility of joint military operations against Islamic State and al Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate, formerly known as the Nusra Front. He suggested rebels were to blame, saying the area was under their control.
Aleppo was once Syria’s commercial and industrial hub but has been ravaged by fighting and roughly divided between government control in the west and rebel control in the east since mid-2012.
When asked what weapons were being used, the source said the army was using precise weapons “suitable for the nature of the targets being struck, according to the type of fortifications”, such as tunnels and bunkers, and “specifically command centres”.
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World powers on Thursday failed to reach a deal on reviving a short-lived ceasefire in Aleppo after what the UN’s Syria mediator called a “long, painful, hard and disappointing” meeting.
