The Syrian government refers to all those fighting to overthrow President Bashar Assad as “terrorists”, including Western-backed opposition groups.
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Seizing Handarat Camp, kilometers away from Aleppo, represents the first land advance of the regime in the attack announced on Thursday. Handarat had been in rebel hands for years.
Planes also continued to pound residential areas on Sunday, flattening buildings, rebels and residents said.
It said another seven people were killed elsewhere in Aleppo province on Saturday.
About 200 airstrikes have pummeled neighborhoods in eastern Aleppo since Friday morning, said Ammar al-Selmo, the head of the Syria Civil Defense group, a volunteer emergency medical service.
Currently Syria is seeing intensified fighting in the city of Aleppo, after the Syrian army declared an end to the week-long ceasefire on Friday, blaming militants for numerous violations that made the cessation of hostilities unreasonable.
The assault on Aleppo could be the biggest battle yet in a civil war that has killed hundreds of thousands of people and driven 11 million from their homes.
A weeklong cease-fire brokered by the United States and Russian Federation ended on September 19, and efforts to revive it have failed. The U.S. says it believes Russian jets were behind the strikes.
“Russia needs to set an example, not a precedent — an unacceptable precedent, I might add, for the entire world”, he said.
‘When it comes to instances such as the bombing of aid targets in Aleppo, we should be looking at whether or not that targeting is done in the knowledge that those are wholly innocent civilian targets, that is a war crime, ‘ he said in a BBC interview aired on Sunday.
A week-long ceasefire agreed between the United States and Russian Federation ended on Monday and efforts to revive the truce failed.
The UN Security Council – which New Zealand is now chairing – is due to meet in NY at 4am tomorrow morning (NZT).
The secretary-general urged the global community to unite and say it will not tolerate the indiscriminate use of power weapons against civilians.
United Nations investigators are looking into the alleged use of the incendiary weapons phosphorus and napalm in several cities.
The war has ground on for almost six years, with all diplomatic efforts collapsing in failure. Islamic State – the enemy of every other party to the conflict – has seized swathes of Syria and neighbouring Iraq.
The foreign ministers of Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and the United States and the EU’s foreign policy chief issued a joint statement after meeting in NY on September 24.
The issues at the heart of the current talks is a USA demand for Russian Federation and Syria to ground their warplanes for seven days to allow aid to get to besieged communities and for opposition groups to separate from Nusra Front, diplomats said.
A truce deal negotiated between Moscow and Washington brought a few days of respite from the violence in Aleppo earlier this month, though no humanitarian aid. But both proved short-lived, with Assad, possibly scenting chances for more battlefield success, showing no sign of compromise.
“The burden is on Russian Federation to prove it is willing and able to take extraordinary steps to salvage diplomatic efforts to restore a cessation of hostilities”, the countries said in the statement.
Yasser al-Yousef, a spokesman for the Nour el-Din al-Zinki rebel faction, says rebels seized Handarat late Saturday night.
Further south in the central city of Homs, a convoy of 36 aid trucks reached the rebel-held district of Waer, the International Committee of the Red Cross said.
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The strategic area fell to government troops on Saturday.
