Cease-fire crumbles in Aleppo

BEIRUT — A burst of fighting in the flashpoint Syrian city of Aleppo on Sunday appeared to shatter a unilateral Russian ceasefire, signaling a resumption of the government’s offensive to seize rebel-held areas there.

Warplanes — either operated by Syrian President Bashar Assad’s government or by Russia, an ally — targeted the opposition neighborhoods of eastern Aleppo on Saturday evening, residents and rebels said. And, they said, progovernment fighters resumed shelling and ground attacks on rebel positions overnight Saturday that continued until Sunday afternoon.

“The attacks have started again, and they are so crazy, so intense,” said Zakaria Malahifji, a member of the Fastakim rebel unit, which is battling in the northern city.

Moscow announced a “humanitarian pause” and halted air raids last week to allow rebels and civilians to flee Aleppo.

Russia recently signaled a major escalation in Syria, apparently dispatching warships, including an aircraft carrier that can hold as many as 40 planes. On Saturday, a spokesman for Russian President Vladimir Putin, Dmitry Peskov, upped the ante by vowing that all of Syria had to be “liberated” by Assad’s forces.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based monitoring group, said Saturday that more than 2,100 civilians, including 479 children, have been killed in Aleppo in the past six months.

On Friday, the top U.N. human rights official, Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, condemned the assaults on rebel areas of Aleppo as “crimes of historic proportions.”

That condemnation came the same day a chemical weapons watchdog determined that the Syrian government carried out a third chemical attack in the conflict-wracked nation in in Qmenas in Idlib governorate on March 16, 2015.