No end to pain and agony in Syria
SOURCE SAYS IT WILL BE ‘COMPREHENSIVE’, WITH GROUND ASSAULT AFTER AIR STRIKES
A Syrian woman carries the body of her infant retrieved from under the rubble of a building following an airstrike yesterday on Aleppo. Syrian airstrikes yesterday hammered Aleppo, as the army prepared a ground offensive to retake the city.
Fighter jets launched some of the heaviest air strikes yet on rebel-held areas of Aleppo yesterday after the Russian-backed Syrian army declared an offensive to fully capture Syria’s biggest city, killing off any hope of reviving a ceasefire.
Residents said the streets were deserted as the 250,000 people still trapped in the besieged opposition-held sector of Aleppo sought shelter from jets. The army said the operation would include a ground attack, and could last “for some time”.
The rebels and the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring body described raids by warplanes they said must belong to Russia. Residents also spoke of attacks by helicopters using bombs made from oil drums, a tactic usually attributed to the Syrian army.
“Can you hear it? The neighbourhood is getting hit right now by missiles. We can hear the planes right now,” Mohammad Abu Rajab, a radiologist, told Reuters. “The planes are not leaving the sky, helicopters, barrel bombs, warplanes.” The intense bombardment left no doubt that the Syrian government of President Bashar Al Assad and its Russian allies had spurned a plea from US Secretary of State John Kerry to halt flights to resurrect the ceasefire, which lasted a week before collapsing on Monday.
A rebel commander said the blasts were the fiercest the city had faced. “I woke up to a powerful earthquake though I was in a place far away from where the missile landed,” he said in a voice recording sent to Reuters.
In a late night announcement on Thursday, the Syrian military announced “the start of its operations in the eastern districts of Aleppo”, and warned people to stay away from “the headquarters and positions of the armed terrorist gangs”.
Elaborating on this yesterday, a military source said the offensive would be a “comprehensive one”, with a ground assault following air and artillery bombardment. “With respect to the air or artillery strikes, they may continue for some time,” it said.
The Syrian army’s declaration of the offensive coincided with international meetings on Syria in New York, the latest diplomatic efforts officially intended to revive the truce, which was brokered by the United States and Russia.
Its collapse, the same fate as all previous efforts to halt a 5-1/2-year-old war that has killed hundreds of thousands of Syrians, has doomed what may be the final bid for a peace breakthrough before President Barack Obama leaves office.
The Syrian government has been tightening its grip on rebel-held districts of Aleppo this year, and this summer achieved a long-held goal of fully encircling the area.
The government already controls the city’s western half, where fewer people have fled. Before the war, the city held nearly three million people and was Syria’s economic hub. Recovering full control of Aleppo would be the most important victory of the war so far for Al Assad, who has sought to consolidate his grip over the western cities where the overwhelming majority of Syrians lived.
Al Assad remains defiant, saying on Thursday he expected the conflict to “drag on” as long as it is part of a global conflict in which the groups fighting him are backed by Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey and the United States.
On Thursday at the United Nations, the US and Russia failed to agree on how to revive the ceasefire during what UN Syria mediator Staffan de Mistura called a “long, painful, difficult and disappointing” meeting.