Regime forces have retaken about 80 percent of former rebel territory in Aleppo since launching an all-out offensive three weeks ago to recapture Syria’s second city.
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Speaking in Geneva, Colville added: “We have received very worrying allegations that hundreds of men have gone missing after crossing into government-controlled areas”, the spokesman added.
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, Rycroft said, “would rather reduce Syria to rubble than to negotiate an overdue peace”. In a statement, the Observatory said dozens of bodies littered streets stretching from al-Shaar to the southern part of eastern Aleppo, including the Old City, as a result of ongoing intense government bombardment.
For years Aleppo was a key battleground and important rebel stronghold, but Assad’s forces have recently made a concerted push to retake the city.
More than 800 people have been killed and 3,000-3,500 wounded in eastern Aleppo in the past 26 days, while the remaining trapped civilians await an effective death sentence, the president of Aleppo local council said.
“If we are not evacuated, our volunteers face torture and execution in the regime’s detention centres”, they said in a statement.
Hundreds of Syrian civilians streamed out on foot from the eastern part of the city of Aleppo on Friday in the wake of the relentless campaign by government troops and their allies to drive rebels from their rapidly crumbling enclave. More than 40 fleeing civilians were killed in a mortar attack last week.
Syrian media and an opposition monitoring group say government troops and allied militias have continued to advance in eastern Aleppo, pushing their way south of the ancient quarters of the city.
Lavrov’s words were echoed by Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova, who called this the “biggest operation for civilian evacuation”.
Tens of thousands of Syrian civilians have already left eastern Aleppo as the army closes in on the rebels.
The IS group’s Aamaq News Agency distributed video showing what it says were Syrian soldiers fleeing their positions in the badlands west of Palmyra.
On Thursday, opposition activists reported intensive bombing in the al-Sukkari and Kallaseh neighborhoods still under rebel control.
In comments published Thursday in the state-owned al-Watan newspaper, Assad in said he would no longer consider truce offers, adding that such proposals, particularly by the Americans, often come when the rebels are in a “difficult spot”.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov met US Secretary of State John Kerry in Hamburg, Germany late on Wednesday.
In London, Britain’s foreign intelligence chief accused Russian Federation and the Syrian government of blocking efforts to end the war in Syria and defeat the extremist group Islamic State (IS) by treating all opponents of Assad as terrorists.
Meanwhile, a spokesman for Russian President Vladimir Putin said the Kremlin regrets a “more than modest” reaction by the global community following the deadly attack on a Russian military hospital in Aleppo on Monday.
Russian Federation and China vetoed a UN Security Council resolution on Monday calling for a week-long ceasefire, with Moscow saying rebels used such pauses in the past to reinforce.
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“An agreement has been reached for our military experts and diplomats to meet on Saturday in Geneva to finish the work that was being done on all these days on the document that defines ways and means for a final solution of the problem of eastern Aleppo according to which all the militants leave it as well as those civilians who want to do so”, Lavrov said.
