Intense air strikes toppled buildings and killed at least 45 civilians in Aleppo on Saturday, two days after the Syrian army announced an offensive to retake the rebel-held east of the city. The Local Coordination Committees, another monitoring group, said 49 were killed on Saturday alone.
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For days, videos and photographs from eastern Aleppo have shown flattened buildings and paramedics pulling bodies from the rubble.
“We are deeply anxious by the high numbers of wounded reported by the hospitals we support, and also know that in many areas the wounded and sick have nowhere to go at all – they are simply left to die”.
Bustan al-Qasr is along the frontline that divides the government-held west from the rebel-held east of the city.
Last Tuesday, Mr Ban launched a stinging attack on the Syrian government, saying it had killed the most civilians in the conflict. The camp, which is nearly empty and largely destroyed, has seen intense fighting and bombardment in recent years, and changed hands multiple times.
A Syrian man carries his son to a field hospital after Syrian and Russian army carried out airstrikes in Aleppo. It said “the criminal campaign aims to settle worldwide accounts at the expense of Syrians’ blood”.
Dozens of people have been reported killed in eastern Aleppo since the army announced the new offensive late on Thursday, burying any remaining hope for reviving a ceasefire that was brokered by the United States and Russian Federation, but which Moscow and its ally President Bashar al-Assad abandoned after a week.
But hopes the truce would be extended collapsed as the US-led coalition apologised for killing more than 62 Syrian soldiers in one of its air strikes.
That same day, an aid convoy was hit by an air strike that United States officials have said was carried out by Russian planes, although Moscow has denied responsibility.
Outside Aleppo, anti-Assad fighters have been driven mostly into rural areas.
Living conditions in the already-battered eastern districts have meanwhile grown even worse.
Western countries and worldwide aid organisations 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.
‘Then in retaliation for that attack a nearby pumping station that pumps water to the entire western part of the city – upwards to 1.5 million people – was deliberately switched off’.
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“Depriving children of water puts them at risk of catastrophic outbreaks of waterborne diseases and adds to the suffering, fear and horror that children in Aleppo live through every day”, she said in a statement. “We’ll support them. We will make it do-able for them”, Sampson told reporters Thursday on a guided tour of the RAF Akrotiri base’s operations. Mosul is the IS group’s last major urban stronghold in Iraq, 225 miles northwest of Baghdad. He expected more “heavy weapons, such as rocket launchers and artillery”.
