Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Shoigu said three corridors would be opened for civilians to exit Aleppo, along with one corridor where Syrian opposition fighters would be encouraged to lay down their arms in exchange for amnesty and pardons.
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Syrian President Bashar al-Assad also issued a decree to provide amnesty for members of armed groups who surrender within three months.
The Syrian army and its allies have surrounded the divided city of Aleppo, targeting opposition fighters and cutting off supply routes into rebel-held areas.
Reports on Thursday said that government forces had taken control of more areas of the city, in the Bani Zeid neighbourhood.
Aleppo, strategically located near Syria’s border with Turkey, is Syria’s largest city and once an economic hub, and it is also a focal point of clashes between the Syrian army and the rebels.
Rebels and residents of Aleppo said they were deeply skeptical of the offer, and there was no sign of people massing to leave the besieged parts of the city.
The UN said on Monday that food supplies in Aleppo were expected to run out in mid-August and many medical facilities continued to be attacked.
Shoigu said in televised comments Thursday that President Vladimir Putin has a “large-scale humanitarian operation” that will be launched outside Aleppo to “help civilians who were taken hostage by terrorists as well as fighters who wanted to lay down the arms”.
In early July, regime forces moved to cut Castello road, which links the contested city of Aleppo with opposition-held Idlib, imposing a total blockade on opposition-controlled areas in Aleppo.
Feras Badawi, a local journalist in the eastern part of the city, said that “there are no corridors open yet, and we don’t trust that they will let us out”.
Aleppo, in the northwest of the country, has been a major battleground in the grinding civil war, with rebel groups holding neighborhoods in the east of the city for years.
As Russia made the announcement, France and Britain renewed demands for an end to the regime’s “disastrous” siege of eastern Aleppo.
Amid reports that Aleppo is ‘de facto besieged, ‘ as the war-battered city is now nearly completely encircled by Syrian troops, the United Nations Emergency Relief Coordinator today reiterated his demand for safe, regular and sustained access to the quarter of a million people trapped behind the front lines, and stressed that “all options must be considered”.
Civilians and unarmed will not be allowed to leave Aleppo through humanitarian corridors, said the Syrian govt and its Russian backers. “The clock is therefore ticking, there is no doubt about that”, Staffan De Mistura told the press after a weekly humanitarian taskforce meeting here.
There have been several presidential amnesty offers in recent years.
“Syria and Russian Federation should provide civilians with safe exit routes, but these routes can’t be used to presume that no civilians remain or to justify attacks against those who do”, said Nadim Houry, deputy Middle East director.
The offer is largely seen by opposition fighters as a publicity stunt and psychological warfare against the rebels.
Separately, Shoigu also said that Moscow is sending a top general and experts to Geneva at the request of U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry to discuss the Aleppo crisis.
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Over the weekend, Syrian and Russian warplanes bombed five hospitals and a blood bank, leaving only two working hospitals to treat the thousands of wounded in the opposition-held side.
