RIYADH, Saudi Arabia – As wave after wave of bombs fell on areas of eastern Aleppo in Syria, ground forces loyal to the Syrian government seized a rebel-held neighborhood on Saturday, intensifying the siege against the rebels and the many civilians who live among them.
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However, today’s movements mark the first major ground advance of the offensive. Handarat, as the camp is known, had been in rebel hands for years.
Warplanes launched some of the heaviest air strikes yet on rebel-held areas of Aleppo on September 23 after the Russian-backed Syrian army declared an offensive to fully capture Syria’s biggest city.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, who hammered out the truce in months of intensive diplomacy, pleaded with Russian Federation to halt air strikes.
Assad has rejected USA accusations that Syrian or Russian planes struck the aid convoy or that his troops were preventing food from entering the city’s rebel-held eastern neighbourhoods, blaming the U.S. for the collapse of the ceasefire.
Unexploded rockets were still buried in the roads in some areas, and elsewhere enormous craters around five metres (16 feet) deep and wide had been left by the bombing.
The U.N. meanwhile said that almost 2 million people in Aleppo, Syria’s largest city and onetime commercial centre, are without running water following the escalation in fighting over the past few days. Russian Federation denies involvement and instead suggests Syrian rebels or a US drone were responsible. It denies targeting civilians.
Hanaa Singer, a UNICEF representative in Syria, said intense attacks damaged the Bab al-Nairab station, which supplies water to the 250,000 people in rebel-held eastern part of Aleppo. “Our teams are responding but are not enough to cover this amount of catastrophe”.
The pumping station supplying rebel-held parts of Aleppo was damaged on Thursday and subsequent strikes had made repairs impossible, Mr Dwyer said.
“People in Aleppo already suffocating under the effects of the siege, have yet again come under horrific attack”, said Carlos Francisco of Doctors Without Borders, which supports a number of area clinics.
‘They are using weapons that appear to be specifically for (bringing down) buildings, ‘ a senior official in an Aleppo-based rebel faction, the Levant Front, told Reuters.
“(Assad’s air forces) have directly targeted civil defense centers”, Alhaj said.
“In many areas, the wounded and sick have nowhere to go at all – they are simply left to die”, said Carlos Francisco, Medecins Sans Frontieres head of mission in Syria.
Rami Abdulrahman, the director for the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the fighting was “back and forth” and inconclusive.
Meanwhile, Syrian rebels said late on Saturday they had regained control of Handarat, a former Palestinian refugee camp north of Aleppo city, after it had earlier fallen to government soldiers.
“I woke up to a powerful natural disaster, though I was in a place far away from where the missile landed”, he said in a voice recording sent to reporters.
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The statement said it was up to Russian Federation to prove it was “willing and able to take extraordinary steps to salvage diplomatic efforts to restore a cessation of hostilities” on the ground, and condemned the Syrian government’s “public denunciation” of the ceasefire.
