“Today in the meeting the Russian delegation confirmed their willingness to sit down with us (Thursday and Friday) to try to agree on a workable humanitarian pause for us to go the Aleppo road way to help the poor people of east as well as in the west”, United Nations humanitarian adviser Jan Egeland said.
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Children began “screaming and suffocating” amid a strong smell of gas, witnesses said.
Russian and Syrian warplanes have bombarded eastern Aleppo and other rebel-held areas of Syria daily for months and the US suggested the humanitarian corridors plan may have been an attempt to depopulate the city so that the Syrian army could seize it. The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported the airstrikes, saying that 24 civilians were killed, along with six others whose affiliation or identities could not yet be confirmed. “But if it did take place, it is a war crime”.
About Russia’s proposal for daily three-hour ceasefires in Aleppo, de Mistura said such short-scale truces were not enough.
Speaking to AFP, Observatory director Rami Abdel Rahman could not confirm that any kind of gas had in fact been used.
Moreover, attacks on civilian infrastructure had left more than two million people without electricity or access to the public water network for several days, it added.
However, Rasheed of Jaish al-Nasr and Ahmed Hamaher of the Nour al Din al-Zinki group, which is also fighting in Aleppo, said government forces had taken some positions but then been quickly forced back.
The government and Russian Federation have accused rebels of using poison gas.
The UN says 300,000 civilians still live in rebel-held parts of Aleppo city, despite four years of fighting and near-daily bombing.
The United States Holocaust Museum is calling for the global community to protect civilians in the war-torn Syrian city of Aleppo, which has become a battleground for rebels and the Assad regime.
Whether they can hold, or even consolidate, their gains in a war marked by fluctuating fortunes is unclear, but the insurgents’ success showed they are capable of checking the momentum that Russia’s air campaign has given Assad in recent months.
Aleppo is important not only because of its size but also for its location near Turkey, a powerful supporter of anti-Assad groups operating it the city. The Arabic-language caption reads “which is one is more useful for Aleppo?”
The source noted that the rebels were preparing to unleash an all-out offensive in Aleppo.
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Aleppo, Syria’s most populous city before the war, is the subject of a bitter fight between various rebel forces and Russian-backed government forces. “The rest will depend on the further discussions with the Russians”.
