U.N. official urges path for convoy

BEIRUT — A top U.N. aid official appealed to the Syrian government and its Russian backers for a cessation of hostilities in eastern Ghouta on Thursday when a second convoy with aid was postponed after government forces split the enclave in two.

Jan Egeland said it is “impossible” to deliver aid to the rebel-held eastern suburbs of Damascus amid the fighting, which he described as the worst ever.

“I’m very worried for a repeat of very many of the bad things we saw in the final days of the battle of Aleppo but to some extent this is worse,” he said in an interview from Oslo, Norway.

Recapturing eastern Ghouta, a short drive away from the Syrian capital, would mark a big victory for President Bashar Assad in the seven-year war. It would be the worst setback for rebels since the opposition was ousted from eastern Aleppo in late 2016 after a similar siege and bombing campaign.

Eastern Ghouta is larger and more populated, with some 400,000 people believed to be living there, trapped under an air and ground bombardment and a crippling yearslong siege. More than 800 people have been killed in the past three weeks.

In rapid advances overnight, troops and allied militiamen seized more than half of the area, including a stretch of farmland, isolating the northern and southern parts of the territory, cutting links between the rebels and squeezing opposition fighters and civilians trapped inside, state media and a war monitor reported.

Meanwhile, fighting continued in the north between Turkish troops and allied militiamen and Syrian Kurdish forces in the Kurdish-controlled enclave of Afrin.

Turkey’s foreign minister, Mevlut Cavusoglu, said his government hopes that the cross-border military offensive in Afrin will end before May.