There was no immediate comment from the Russian or Syrian militaries detailing Friday’s air strikes.
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The Syrian army’s advance on eastern Aleppo follows a siege of the terrorist-held area, where a quarter of a million people are estimated to be living. It has been a focal point of clashes between the Syrian army and the rebels.
A pro-regime Iraqi militia commander in the Aleppo area told Reuters the aim was to capture all of Aleppo within a week.
A Syrian man carries the body of an infant retrieved from under the rubble of a building following a reported airstrike on September 23, 2016, on the al-Muasalat area in the northern city of Aleppo.
“There are planes in the sky now”, Ammar Al-Selmo, the head of the Civil Defence rescue service in the opposition-held east, told Reuters from Aleppo on Saturday morning.
It said several of its own headquarters have been targeted. “Our teams are responding but are not enough to cover this amount of catastrophe”.
Syrian and Russian warplanes launched a ferocious assault against rebel-held Aleppo on Friday, burying any hopes that a US -backed cease-fire could be salvaged and calling into question whether the deal would ever have worked. “With respect to the air or artillery strikes, they may continue for some time”, it said.
The deal has since fallen apart, and on Thursday the Syrian army announced an operation to retake all of Aleppo.
The group says it has just two fire engines left for all of east Aleppo which, like its ambulances, are struggling to move around the city.
“They are using weapons that appear to be specifically for (bringing down) buildings”, a senior official in an Aleppo-based rebel faction, the Levant Front, told Reuters.
“That pumping station pumps water to the entire population of the eastern part of city – that’s at least 200,000 people and then in retaliation for that attack a nearby pumping station that pumps water to the entire western part of the city – upwards to 1.5 million people – was deliberately switched off”, Dwyer said.
Saturday’s death toll of 25 was expected to rise because people remained trapped under rubble, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based monitoring group. He said it is the United States that needs to come around to the idea that President Bashar al-Assad is the only viable partner in the fight against terrorism, calling his army “the single most efficient force fighting terror in Syria”.
“The raids are intense and continuous”, Observatory Director Rami Abdulrahman said.
The Syrian army announced on Monday the end of the week-long cease-fire, without extending it, as part of the Syrian government’s dismay with the USA -led attack against Syrian military positions in Deir al-Zour earlier this week, which killed 90 Syrian soldiers, and the violations the rebels were said to have committed during the truce time.
“I woke up to a powerful quake though I was in a place far away from where the missile landed”, he said in a voice recording sent to Reuters.
The denial of access to food, water and medicines has been used repeatedly as a weapon by all sides in Syria’s brutal five-year-old civil war.
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“One can only speak about the cease-fire revival on the collective basis”, he said in an interview for the TV news show Vesti.
