Ankara says the Kremlin is trying to divert attention from its own “crimes” including “starving” cities into submission.
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The military push comes shortly after the government and its allies cut off the rebels’ main supply route into the city.
The slain general’s assignment was described as “advising pro-government forces in the fight against the Islamic State”, but it is not yet clear if ISIS militants, or fighters from one of the many other rebel factions, were his killers.
Tens of thousands fled the city on Friday. Men carried luggage on top of their heads, and the elderly and those unable to walk were brought in wheelchairs. A government siege of Aleppo and its rebel strongholds would deal a potentially devastating blow.
In northeastern Syria, various groups backed by the U.S. and linked under the banner of the Syrian Democratic Forces were also making progress but Aleppo in the northwest was in danger of falling to Syrian government forces, Air Force Col. Patrick Ryder, a spokesman for U.S. Central Command, said Friday.
The north Aleppo countryside is now completely encircled by forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad, two and a half years after the area fell out of government control in the wake of a popular uprising.
Earlier, a Syrian opposition delegation that had been formed in Riyadh said the situation near Aleppo was among the factors behind the deterioration of the situation around the intra-Syrian talks in Geneva. Haj Ali said the town had not yet fallen, but that there were “very heavy battles”.
Dozens of Syrian refugees already in Turkey queued up on the Turkish side at Oncupinar to beg the authorities to allow in their relatives fleeing the latest bombardments in Syria.
Aleppo city, Syria’s former economic powerhouse, has been divided between opposition control in the east and regime control in the west since mid-2012.
A non-Syrian senior security source close to Damascus told Reuters on Thursday that Qassem Soleimani, commander of foreign operations of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps, was overseeing operations in the Aleppo area.
In another development, Syrian government forces supported by Russian warplanes recaptured a rebel-held town near Deraa, according to Hezbollah’s Al Manar television and a Syrian monitoring group Friday.
Meanwhile, the United Nations said in its statement that access to affected people was becoming increasingly hard amid the fighting.
On Friday, Russia’s United Nations ambassador Vitali Churkin told reporters in NY that blaming Russia for the failure of talks was “in bad taste”.
Carter said he looked forward to discussing the offer of ground troops with the Saudi defence minister in Brussels next week. He called for Russian Federation to start a “calm de-escalation” of its actions.
Mohammed Alloush, who represents the powerful Army of Islam group, said the opposition did not withdraw from the UN-sponsored talks in Geneva because it “didn’t want to get blamed” for their failure.
But tensions remain, with Moscow accusing key opposition backer Ankara of actively preparing to invade Syria, a claim Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan dismissed as “laughable”.
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Sitting in his vehicle with his four children right inside the Turkish side of the border, 43-year-old Ahmet Sadul was hoping to get back into Syria so he could find his relatives.
