Civilians in east Aleppo ‘face starvation within days’ as rebels falter
SYRIAN government forces yesterday claimed full control of the rebel-held district of Masaken Hanano in the northern battlefield city of Aleppo, as civilians feared they would soon run out of food.
The 275,000 civilians in the area will face starvation within days unless convoys of lorries filled with aid are granted entry, the UN warned this week.
“There is no food left from the World Food Programme or the UN in east Aleppo,” UN humanitarian adviser Jan Egeland warned. “Plan A, that hundreds of standby aid trucks deliver medicine and food to east Aleppo must succeed. There is no Plan B, because that means starvation,” Mr Egeland said on Twitter.
On the same day, the White Helmets, a US-backed search-and-rescue group active in the war zone, said residents were 10 days away from starvation.
Four days later, not a single shipment of aid has been allowed to enter east Aleppo, an area Mr Egeland described as “in freefall”.
Aid groups and the international community have criticised the Russian and Syrian governments for their failure to approve the UN aid plan that rebel groups have already agreed.
But for Damascus, there is little urgency to cede even the slightest bit of control. After two months of all-out assault on east Aleppo, Syrian government forces are seeing the tide turn.
Yesterday, Syrian army troops claimed control of the Hanano neighbourhood of east Aleppo.
It was a tactical victory as well as a symbolic win: Hanano, a key entry point into the eastern part of the city, was the first neighbourhood to fall to rebels in 2012. After four years, government forces now have a vital toehold on the city’s eastern quarter.
Further south, on the outskirts of Damascus, the tide continues to turn.
A truce was yesterday reached between government and opposition parties in the previously rebel-held village of Al-Tal, after more than two years of siege.
The deal will allow exhausted opposition fighters to leave Al-Tal and take their personal weapons with them on the grounds that they surrender all heavy weapons. It will also open the area up for much-needed humanitarian aid.
Local activists cautioned on social media that, as with the Darayya truce in August, the Al-Tal deal is designed to pave the way for an ethnic rebalancing, with opposition-supporting Sunnis out and Damascus-backing Shiites in.
For Damascus, experiencing a surge of confidence after a year of Russian military backing, these allegations, whether from opposition groups or from the international community, are increasingly easy to ignore.