Warplanes knock out Aleppo hospital as assault intensifies

US threatens to end negotiations with Russia on Syria

BEIRUT, Sept 28, (Agencies): Russian or Syrian warplanes knocked a major Aleppo hospital out of service on Wednesday, hospital workers said, and ground forces intensified an assault on the city’s besieged rebel sector, in a battle that has become a potentially decisive turning point in the civil war.

Shelling damaged at least another hospital and a bakery, killing six residents queuing up for bread under a siege that has trapped 250,000 people with food running out.

The World Health Organization said it had reports that both hospitals were now out of service.

The week-old assault has already killed hundreds of people, with bunker-busting bombs bringing down buildings on residents huddled inside. Only about 30 doctors are believed to be left inside the besieged zone, coping with hundreds of wounded a day.

“The warplane flew over us and directly started dropping its missiles ... at around 4 a.m.,” Mohammad Abu Rajab, a radiologist at the M10 hospital, the largest trauma hospital in the city’s rebel-held sector, told Reuters.

“Rubble fell in on the patients in the intensive care unit.”

M10 hospital workers said oxygen and power generators were destroyed and patients were transferred to another hospital. There were no initial reports of casualties in the hospital.

Photographs sent to Reuters by a hospital worker at the facility showed damaged storage tanks, a rubble strewn area, and the collapsed roof of what he said was a power facility.

The government of President Bashar al-Assad, backed by Russian air power, Iranian ground forces and Shi’ite militia fighters from Iran, Iraq and Lebanon, has launched a massive assault to crush the rebels’ last major urban stronghold.

Syria’s largest city before the war, Aleppo has been divided for years between government and rebel zones, and would be the biggest strategic prize of the war for Assad and his allies.

Taking full control of the city would restore near full government rule over the most important cities of western Syria, where nearly all of the population lived before the start of a conflict that has since made half of Syrians homeless, caused a refugee crisis and contributed to the rise of Islamic State.

The offensive began with unprecedentedly fierce bombing last week, followed by a ground campaign this week, burying a ceasefire that had been the culmination of months of diplomacy between Washington and Moscow.

Meanwhile, US Secretary of State John Kerry called his Russian counterpart on Wednesday and warned him that Washington will end talks on the Syrian conflict unless Moscow halts the assault on Aleppo.

A State Department spokesman said Kerry told Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov that plans to set up a joint USRussia military cell to target jihadist groups in Syria would also be put on hold.

“He informed the foreign minister that the United States is making preparations to suspend US-Russia bilateral engagement on Syria ... unless Russia takes immediate steps to end the assault on Aleppo and restore the cessation of hostilities,” spokesman John Kirby said.

Kerry and Lavrov have been leading international efforts to bring Syria’s five-year-old civil war to an end, and on September 9 agreed to demand a ceasefire.

Moscow was to order its ally Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad to rein in his military and end the bombardment of civilian communities, and Washington was to persuade rebel forces to separate themselves from the jihadist Fateh al-Sham, the former al-Qaeda affiliate once known as Al-Nusra Front.

France’s foreign minister said on Wednesday he was working to put forward a UN Security Council resolution for a ceasefire in the Syrian city of Aleppo, and that any country that opposed it would be deemed complicit in war crimes.

Speaking to lawmakers, Jean-Marc Ayrault accused Syria, backed by Russia and Iran, of carrying out an “all-out war” on its people, something that Paris could not sit by idly watching.

“At this very moment, we are proposing

to discuss a resolution to obtain a ceasefire in Aleppo,” Ayrault said. “This resolution will leave everyone facing their responsibilities: those who don’t vote for it, risk being held responsible for complicity in war crimes.”

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon condemned the attacks Wednesday on the two largest hospitals in rebelheld parts of Syria’s Aleppo as “war crimes.”

“Let us be clear. Those using ever more destructive weapons know exactly what they are doing. They know they are committing war crimes,” Ban told the Security Council.

“Imagine the destruction. People with limbs blown off. Children in terrible pain with no relief,” he said. “Imagine a slaughterhouse. This is worse.”

From a sandbagged army post near the border with Syria, Lebanese soldiers gaze through tripod-mounted binoculars into hills where jihadist militants are entrenched, a forgotten front in Syria’s civil war that has led to bombings inside Lebanon.