Leaflets were airdropped over Aleppo declaring that three routes out of the city would allow safe passage for civilians. “As I told the UN Security Council on Monday, we demand safe, regular and sustained access to the quarter of a million people trapped behind the front lines”.
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Mr Shoigu described the corridors as a “large-scale humanitarian operation”.
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad said on the same day, he would offer Amnesty to rebels who are willing to give up their weapons and surrender to authorities in the next three months.
Hael Asi Hilal, head of the Syrian Red Crescent in rebel-held areas, said no family so far had been able to leave to government-held areas via any corridor due to snipers firing at them.
Shoigu said Putin, in response to a request by Kerry, ordered Gen. Stanislav Gadzhimagomedov and a group of experts to the Swiss city, which has hosted several rounds of Syrian talks and worldwide negotiators trying to resolve the crisis.
Nadim Houry, the deputy Middle East director at Human Rights Watch, said the safe-passage offer, “doesn’t mean that the people who stay behind are legitimate military targets”.
The U.N. envoy for Syria, Staffan de Mistura, said he wants to see how the United Nations could coordinate with Russian Federation on its plan to help civilians and opposition fighters who lay down their weapons outside Aleppo, which he called “de-facto” besieged.
Thursday’s report came as the Russian government says safe passage is being offered out of rebel-held areas of the city to civilians and rebels who lay down their arms.
In another development, the leader of Syria’s Al-Nusra Front said in a recording aired Thursday that his group is changing its name, saying it will have no more ties with al Qaeda in an attempt to undermine a potential USA and Russian air campaign against its fighters.
“All parties are required and obliged under long-established and accepted global humanitarian law to allow safe, unimpeded, impartial and immediate humanitarian access for civilians to leave and come in”, O’Brien said.
De Mistura told reporters on Thursday that he understood Russian military experts “and perhaps (some) from the U.S.” were headed to Geneva, “most likely in order to discuss the devils in the details” of the two powers’ efforts to end the fighting in Syria.
“If Assad shows that he is winning Aleppo, and he’s now also advancing on the rebels in Damascus, it could trigger a more dramatic shift by finally convincing opposition groups that they have lost the war”, said Aron Lund, nonresident associate of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The TV also aired a call from Aleppo clerics, calling on armed groups to drop their weapons.
Forces loyal to Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad walk past rubble after they advanced on the southern side of the Castello road in Aleppo, Syria, in this handout picture provided by SANA on July 28, 2016.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group says government forces have taken command of large swaths of Aleppo’s Bani Zeid.
Russian and Syria have said they are opening humanitarian corridors out of besieged, rebel-held areas in the northern Syrian city of Aleppo.
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.
Earlier in the day, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said Moscow and Damascus had launched a joint large-scale humanitarian relief operation in Aleppo, establishing three corridors for civilians and one for militants wishing to lay down arms, and said that Moscow offered the worldwide organizations working in Syria to join this operation. “The global community simply can not let eastern Aleppo city become yet another, and by far the largest, besieged area”.
The offer came in a decree issued on Thursday, the state-run Sana news agency reported.
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Khandakani said the offensive and siege is depriving him of his “brief feelings of independence and freedom” living in the part of the city under rebel control since 2012.
