It is reported by UNICEF that in rebel-held eastern Aleppo, which has been besieged for almost a month, about 300,000 civilians, including more than 120,000 children, are trapped amid the violence, and are in desperate need of food, clean water, and health services.
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On Wednesday, Lieutenant-General Sergey Chvarkov, the director of the Russian Reconciliation Center in Syria, said the information was given to the United States on Monday, a day prior to the attack, Press TV reported. Russian Federation has carried out airstrikes in Syria since September in support of the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. The group is embedded with other rebel outfits in Syria and is one of the most effective fighting forces against President Bashar Assad’s troops.
Al Masri said he took cover in a basement for an hour with neighbors, including children, as strikes hammered the area. In April, an air strike on a hospital in rebel-held Aleppo killed dozens of people.
Russian Federation then accused the Nureddin al Zenki opposition group of killing seven people with a “poisonous agent” in the Salaheddin district of Aleppo on Tuesday.
“One of them was a child who lost his leg, and he is now in a serious condition”. He was just 7 or 8 years old. “Insurgents fired rocket launchers and homemade mortars at the “Castello” shopping mall, the areas of Ansar and al-Hadher as well as the Leramon district”, it said.
SANA also said rebel fighters surrendered themselves to the authorities.
The head of Russian military’s Reconciliation Center at the Hemeimeem air base in Syria, Lieutenant General Sergei Chvarkov, said on August 3 that the rebels struck a residential area in eastern Aleppo with a toxic agent.
Rebels detonated a bomb in a tunnel underneath a government position in the Ramouseh area, the observatory said.
More than 40 civilians have been killed in opposition bombardment of those neighbourhoods since Sunday.
Aleppo, Syria’s largest province and once a thriving economic metropolis, has witnessed intensified violent battles lately as the Syrian army advances against the rebels in the north.
Giving people who want to leave Syria’s Aleppo the possibility of doing so through humanitarian corridors is important but it is not a substitute for on-the-ground humanitarian access, a spokeswoman for Mercy Corps, a global humanitarian aid agency, told Sputnik, commenting on the opening in late July of three humanitarian corridors for civilians and one for militants wishing to lay down arms by Russian Federation and Syria.
The strikes came despite an appeal by US Secretary of State John Kerry on Monday for Russian Federation to “restrain” itself and its ally in Damascus from “offensive operations”. While the United Nations special envoy for Syria, Staffan de Mistura, welcomed the humanitarian initiative, the reaction from the US was rather more reserved.
Abu Nizar Firas, a resident of eastern Aleppo, said the corridors were not safe, and it was impossible for young men to leave. The thick black smoke rising off the tires can be seen stretching across the city, darkening the horizon and greatly decreasing visibility from the sky.
Russian Federation and the United States back opposing sides in Syria s five-year war, which has left 280,000 people dead and forced half the population to flee their homes.
“These are imaginary corridors, false corridors only to show the worldwide community that they are working on humanitarian issues with the Russian side”, he said.
The New York-based Physicians for Human Rights group said the last week of July was the worst week for attacks on medical facilities in the region since the Syrian war began in 2011. “It’s like we’re erasing a century of progress for humanity, for civilization”.
The group said each attack between July 23 and July 31, including three strikes on hospitals in Aleppo’s eastern half within a 24-hour period, killed patients and “further deprived almost 300,000 people now trapped in eastern Aleppo of life-saving medical care”.
“We are ready to go in with supplies as soon as we have the pause, and we have a two-way corridor going in to the people in Eastern Aleppo, but also Western Aleppo, which has now become much more exposed to problems, and which has enormous access problems as well”, said Egeland. Our doctors were prepared to treat people showing symptoms of gas poisoning.
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When asked if the USA believed that this was Moscow’s intention, a senior State Department official said, “It’s hard to know what their ultimate goal is”. But the official said there was growing confidence it was such an attack, and that chlorine was likely used. Even if, or when, the government retakes the alleged target stretch of Syria, it will still face the massive task of rebuilding a shattered economy and wrestling back control from militias and profiteers who have built robust patronage networks that rival the traditional hierarchies of the Assad family’s authoritarian rule.
