As the fighting between Syrian rebel forces and Assad’s military continues, sources from within the country are reporting that risky chemical weapons have been used over the past few days in Aleppo.
Advertisement
Russia, the main ally of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, has vowed that it will halt its air strikes and artillery strikes between 0700 GMT and 1000 GMT for an unspecified period, starting Thursday.
He also said the three-hour Russian offer of a truce every day in Aleppo is “not enough”.
De Mistura said an attack with chlorine gas in Syria would be “a war crime” but said he could not confirmation that it actually happened.
The Special Advisor to the UN Special Envoy to Syria, Jan Egeland, says they are waiting for the “all clear” to deliver the badly-needed supplies.
Advances by warring sides in the last month, which resulted in a siege of rebel-held neighbourhoods and the severing of a major route into government areas of control, have choked off supplies and raised fears of the encirclement of the entire civilian population.
An AFP correspondent in the east said trucks carrying food were unable to enter the city because of intense bombardment.
Rudskoy said that “more than 1,000 were killed and about 2,000 wounded” in the rebel ranks over the past four days southwest of Aleppo.
The group said Thursday it has documented six airstrikes by Syrian and Russian government planes in the rebel-held province of Idlib and besieged parts of Aleppo that have temporarily shut down the health facilities and killed at least 17 civilians.
“On the issue of Daesh, we have made a call to Russian Federation”.
Doctors in the eastern half implored US President Barack Obama on Thursday to protect civilians from repeated atrocities in their city.
A Foreign office statement said: “The Foreign Secretary made clear that while we have some significant differences with Russian Federation, we need to continue to build a constructive dialogue on issues of mutual concern as well as on points of disagreement”. “We can not allow this to happen”, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power said. The monitor said it had not yet confirmed how numerous remaining six people killed were civilians or IS jihadists.
“With heavy bombing continuing relentlessly in Aleppo especially, hospitals and clinics need to be treated as the sacred life-saving places they are, not as additional bombing targets”, said HRW’s Nadim Houry.
The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) said Thursday that reports of possible chemical weapons use in Syria “are of great concern”.
Accusations involving use of chlorine and other poisonous gases are not uncommon in Syria’s civil war, and both sides have denied using them while blaming the other for using them as a weapon of war. It said the raid destroyed a large ammunition depot, a plant producing chemical weapons and a large IS training camp. Syrians are a peaceful society – they want peace.
A senior Russian senator yesterday said Moscow was planning to expand its Hmeimim airbase on Syria’s coast into a permanent facility. “The appropriate infrastructure will be built and our servicemen will live in worthy conditions”, Frants Klintsevich, the deputy head of Russia’s senate committee for defence, told Izvestia newspaper.
Advertisement
The monitor could not specify how many of those killed were ISIS militants.
