Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Air war on Aleppo heats up
Rebels, civil-defense hubs struck in new Allepo offensive
Syrian Civil Defense rescue workers, or White Helmets, deal with a damaged ambulance outside the group’s main center in Aleppo as the aerial bombing campaign against rebel-held areas of the city intensified Friday in the wake of a fractured cease-fire agreement. At least 27 civilians died in dozens of airstrikes, an observer group said.
BEIRUT — An aerial bombing campaign in rebel-held districts of Syria’s Aleppo city intensified Friday, targeting several neighborhoods and centers of the award-winning volunteer civil-defense group known as the White Helmets, as the government announced a new offensive in the area.
Diplomatic efforts in New York have failed to salvage a Syrian cease-fire that lasted nearly a week before giving way to a new level of violence. Residents and activists say the bombing, which began in earnest late Wednesday, has been unprecedented, targeting residential areas, infrastructure and civil-defense centers. Some streets have been closed off because of piles of rubble.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said at least 27 civilians, including three children, were killed in about 30 raids that began overnight. A member of the city’s forensic team, Mohammed Abu Jaafar, said he had documented nine deaths since late Thursday, including five women and two children. Abu Jaafar said it was impossible to document casualties and injuries Friday because of the intensity of the bombing.
The Observatory said dozens of people were wounded and an unknown number remained buried under the rubble of buildings destroyed in the airstrikes that began in the early hours of Thursday. In the neighborhood of Bab al-Nairab a girl was pulled out alive from under the rubble earlier Friday, according to Ibrahim Alhaj, a member of the Syrian Civil Defense, also known as the White Helmets.
Alhaj said three of the group’s centers had been targeted in the air bombing campaign that usually accelerates after dark. By Friday morning, one center in the Ansari neighborhood in the southern part of the rebel-held district had been put out of service after it was hit at about 7 a.m. Ambulances and the one fire engine that serves the rebel-held part of Aleppo had been damaged. In another center, Alhaj said, a bomb fell in the courtyard of the center and the extent of the damage was not yet clear.
“It is really critical. [Syrian President Bashar Assad’s air forces] have directly targeted civil-defense centers,” Alhaj said. There were no reported casualties among the group’s volunteers.
“I have not seen in my life such bombardment. It is very, very intense,” Alhaj said.
“The regime tried to advance in several neighborhoods in Aleppo,” he said, adding that rebels have so far been able to repel all attacks. He said the attack on civil-defense centers had hindered their work because some of their vehicles had been destroyed.
A Syrian military official said Friday that airstrikes and shelling in Aleppo might continue for an extended period and the operation will expand into a ground invasion of rebel-held districts. The unnamed military official was quoted by Syrian state media as saying that operations in rebel-held eastern parts of the city “will include a ground offensive.”
The military said leaflets were dropped over rebel-held parts of the city calling on opposition gunmen to surrender and benefit from a recent amnesty issued by the state for fighters who agree to put down their arms.
“The belt is getting tighter around you. Surrender now or you will meet your inevitable destiny,” read one of the leaflets.
The Nour el-Din el-Zinki insurgent group, which is powerful in Aleppo, said the government’s offensive shows that the government and its allies want to impose “a military solution” to Syria’s crisis.
“We will continue to defend our people in Aleppo and our existence. We will not surrender,” the group said in a statement. “We will repel them. Aleppo will remain free of Assad, his sectarian militias and thugs.”
The air campaign was followed by an announcement late Thursday by Syria’s military command in Aleppo that it is launching new operations in rebel-held eastern quarters of the city.
Rami Abdurrahman of the Observatory for Human Rights said Friday that government troops seized buildings on the front line, pushing back rebel fighters in the southern al-Amiriah district.
Alhaj confirmed the government troop movements on the city’s southern edge.
The Observatory said there were also air raids on the north of Aleppo city, and reported clashes on the front line, near the old city center.
After a contentious 2½-hour meeting Thursday with colleagues in New York, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov had follow-up consultations Friday in a bid to find a way forward.
“We exchanged some ideas and we had a little bit of progress,” Kerry said, toning down the anger he had expressed with Russia’s position a day earlier and in a Wednesday speech at the U.N. Security Council. “We’re evaluating some mutual ideas in a constructive way.”
‘ARROGANT’ WEST
In a speech to the U.N. General Assembly on Friday, Lavrov laid the blame for a “bleeding Middle East and North Africa” on the U.S. and its allies. Lavrov depicted Russia’s military involvement in Syria as crucial to efforts to prevent the crisis from spiraling even more out of control. Invoking George Orwell and his anti-utopian Animal Farm novel “where all animals are equal, but some are more equal,” he accused Western powers of promoting their own interests to the detriment of others, through “mentoring, supremacy [and] exclusiveness.” Their “arrogant attitude and feeling of their infallibility in pushing forward unilateral hazardous solutions to the most complex conflicts and crises can be observed by the example of bleeding Middle East and North Africa,” he said. “As a result, the basis of world stability is being destroyed.”
Assad blamed the United States for the deal’s failure in an Associated Press interview earlier this week, citing the U.S.’ inability to control “terrorist” groups and a weekend attack that killed dozens of Syrian soldiers. The U.S. apologized for what it described as a mistake, and Lavrov on Friday called for an “unbiased and impartial investigation” of the attack.
The war has killed as many as a half-million people, contributed to Europe’s worst refugee crisis since World War II, and allowed the Islamic State extremist group to emerge as a global terror threat.
Lavrov depicted his country’s military assistance to Assad as the one positive counterweight to the chaos, saying it prevented “the collapse of the statehood and disintegration of that country under the onslaught of terrorists” and claiming it was the impetus to high-level — but for now ineffective — international attempts to resolve the conflict through diplomacy.
He blamed Washington for the failure of the latest peace effort, saying responsibility for lack of success in separating the “so-called moderate opposition from terrorists … lies with the U.S. and members of the U.S.-led coalition.”