Airstrikes pound Aleppo as opposition says food and medicine are scarce
BEIRUT Syrian residents in the opposition-held eastern part of Aleppo hunkered under a fresh wave of airstrikes on Friday amid intense clashes between government forces and rebels, while a senior opposition official warned that supplies of food and medicines were fast running out in the besieged city.
The aerial bombardment is part of a weeks-long devastating military campaign by Syria and Russia that the opposition says has killed dozens of people in the past three days alone.
President Bashar Assad has expressed his intention to recapture the northern city’s rebel eastern neighborhoods, saying that a military victory in Aleppo would provide the Syrian army with a “springboard” from which to liberate other areas of the country.
“You have to keep cleaning this area and to push the terrorists to Turkey to go back to where they came from, or to kill them,” Assad said in an interview with a Russian media outlet, Komsomolskaya Pravda, released on Thursday.
“There’s no other option,” he added.
Syrian government forces have encircled the eastern half of Aleppo, besieging tens of thousands of people and pounding the territory with airstrikes on a daily basis. The siege and deadly bombardment have caused an international outcry with a number of countries and groups accusing Syria and Russia of war crimes in connection with attacks on medical facilities and aid convoys.
Many of the victims of this week’s intense bombing have been children, reported CBS News’ Elizabeth Palmer from Aleppo. The world will never know which rebel fighter shot the mortar that ripped into 8-year old Zeina’s body. Surgeons did their best, but Zeina died of devastating shrapnel wounds.
So did five-year-old Ismael, who never made it out of intensive care.
Samir Hellaq, deputy director of education in Aleppo, was overcome by the senselessness of it all.
“These kids committed no crime,” he said. “They were unarmed. They just wanted to learn.”
The mortar landed in an ordinary Aleppo residential neighborhood. It hit at 7:45 in the morning, and the children who died were just walking to school.
Mohammad Fadelah, the head of the Aleppo Provincial Council, said the opposition had brought in enough supplies to Aleppo under an emergency plan that would last six months. But he said that with the recent escalation and bombing of hospitals and bakeries, supplies were quickly running out.
“We have emergency reserves but I think we can maybe go another month with what we have. Flour will run out in a month,” he told reporters by telephone Friday from the city of Gazientep in southern Turkey. He estimated there were around 275,000 people in the besieged, eastern Aleppo.
President Barack Obama planned to convene his National Security Council for a highly anticipated meeting about Syria on Friday. Having cut off diplomatic talks with Russia after a cease-fire in Syria failed, the Obama administration has been at a loss to find a new viable strategy to stem the violence even as the bloodshed in Aleppo and elsewhere continues to mount.
The violence also gives additional urgency to the upcoming meeting between Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry on efforts to find a peace deal in Syria in Switzerland on Saturday. It will be the first face-to-face contact between the two men since Washington broke off bilateral diplomatic contact with Moscow earlier this month.
Late Friday, Iran’s semi-official Fars news agency reported that Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif will also attend the talks in the Swiss city of Lausanne.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported dozens of overnight airstrikes on eastern Aleppo. It added that clashes are taking place on the northern and southern edges of the city.
The Aleppo Media Center, an activist collective, said the airstrikes killed and wounded a number of people, with some buried under the debris.
Among the areas hit was the eastern Sakhour neighborhood where one of the city’s largest hospitals, known as M10, was stuck again. It had been hit several times over the past month, putting it out of service.
The Observatory said several people were wounded in the attack while the Aleppo Media Center said the hospital was hit three times on Friday and that a fire broke out afterward at the facility. Ibrahim Alhaj, a member of the Syrian Civil Defense, said the fire was quickly extinguished.
Earlier this week, the Observatory said at least 358 civilians have been killed in eastern Aleppo since the U.S. and Russian-brokered truce collapsed in September. The U.N. says over 100 children have been killed in the campaign, which has also included a limited ground offensive.
Doctors Without Borders said three weeks of airstrikes on eastern Aleppo have killed 114 children and wounded 320 others. The international charity, also known by its French acronym MSF, said hospitals are reporting that because patients struggle to access medical facilities, some people with easily treatable wounds develop complications or reach the facilities too late.
“The international community has become immune to images of dead children being recovered from the rubble of buildings ravaged by bombs. This has become a daily occurrence,” said Carlos Francisco, MSF Head of Mission for Syria. “All sorts of civilian spaces are being hit; schools are being damaged. The reality is that children die every day in what appears to be a ‘kill box’.”
The U.N. children’s agency said in a statement that rebel shelling of a government neighborhood in Aleppo on Thursday killed four children and wounded three who were on their way to school.
“UNICEF calls on all parties to the conflict to protect civilians and stop attacks on civilian infrastructure, including schools and education facilities, in accordance with their obligations under international humanitarian law,” the statement said. “Children should be protected at all times”.
In the town of Azaz, north of Aleppo near the Turkish border, amateur videos released on Friday show the aftermath of a blast that targeted rebels and killed at least 17 people.
In one of the videos, a man is seen weeping as he screams the name of a missing man, Mohammed. The video also shows a victim being carried away in a black body bag. Another video shows several bodies lying on a pavement outside what appears to be a hospital. The videos appear genuine and corresponded to other AP reporting of the events depicted.
Near the capital of Damascus, government forces captured the rebel-held area of Deir Khabiyeh, according to state media and the Observatory.