But as diplomats from the U.S., Saudi Arabia, Russia and Iran met Thursday on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in NY in a bid to restore the truce, the Syrian army announced the start of its new offensive against Aleppo’s opposition-controlled districts.
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President Bashar Assad rejected USA accusations that Syrian or Russian planes struck an aid convoy in Aleppo or that his troops were preventing food from entering the city’s rebel-held eastern neighborhoods.
Activists claim the latest air attacks have tried to further cripple the limited resources in the rebel zones.
The White Helmets group, which operates in rebel-held parts of the country, was this week named as one of the winners of an award often called “the alternative Nobel prize”. In the middle is Aleppo, which has faced some of the harshest bombardment it has seen in months. The incendiary weapon burns at extreme temperatures.
Rami Abdurrahman of the Observatory for Human Rights said Friday that government troops seized buildings on the frontline, pushing back rebel fighters in the southern al-Amiriah district.
More than 70 airstrikes have hammered parts of Aleppo since Wednesday, the group said.
There was no immediate comment from the Syrian military or mention on state media of Thursday’s bombardment of Aleppo. “Two of them are now out of service”, Abdul Rahman al-Hassani of the White Helmets told Al Jazeera.
“Absent a major gesture like this, we don’t believe there is a point to making more promises or issuing more plans or announcing something that can’t be reached”, Kerry said, describing a “moment of truth” for Syria, Russia and all those trying to halt the bloodshed.
The United Nations has 40 trucks with aid ready to enter eastern Aleppo. It brought a lull in fighting for several days last week, but aid convoys never reached the needy amid hold-up for clearance from Assad’s government.
The aircraft pounded rebel-held areas of Aleppo after the army announced a new offensive aimed at retaking all of the divided second city. The top USA military official told Congress he thought grounding all warplanes was a bad idea and Russia’s deputy foreign minister said grounding the flights would make matters worse.
Russian commanders should be probed for war crimes if they deliberately attacked a United Nations aid convoy in Syria, the Defence Secretary has said.
He said his enemies alone were to blame for almost six years of devastation across Syria, and while acknowledging some mistakes, repeatedly denied any excesses by his troops. “The US, the statement says, is now an ‘assailant enemy.’ This therefore makes cooperation with the US an alliance with an enemy against Muslims – which can render cooperators apostates”.
At least 80 people died on Thursday, a member of the city’s forensic team told AP, but Friday’s bombing has been so intense that it has been impossible for monitors to safely document new injuries and casualties. It was not immediately possible to verify or assess the extent of the damage or independently confirm who hit it. In early August, rebels from outside Aleppo city broke the siege, recapturing a corridor.
The government, meanwhile, claimed victory over another small corner of the country, in the central city of Homs.
Approximately 300 rebels and their families in the last rebel-held neighbourhood of Al-Waer were evacuated north, after accepting amnesty and surrendering to Assad’s forces. Then, the ministry denied any Russian or Syrian involvement as its spokesman suggested, in Kerry’s words, that “the food and the medicine just spontaneously combusted”.
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At least 30 strikes hit the rebel-held east of the city during the night and early this morning.
