Russia warns US not to attack Syrian forces

BEIRUT >> Russia warned the United States Saturday against carrying out any attacks on Syrian government forces, saying it would have repercussions across the Middle East as government forces captured a hill on the edge of the northern city of Aleppo under the cover of airstrikes.

Russian news agencies quoted Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova as saying that a U.S. intervention against the Syrian army “will lead to terrible, tectonic consequences not only on the territory of this country but also in the region on the whole.”

She said regime change in Syria would create a vacuum that would be “quickly filled” by “terrorists of all stripes.”

U. S.-Russian tensions over Syria have escalated since the breakdown of a cease-fire last month, with each side blaming the other for its failure. Syrian government forces backed by Russian warplanes have launched a major onslaught on rebel-held parts of the northern city of Aleppo.

Syrian troops pushed ahead in their offensive in Aleppo on Saturday, capturing the strategic Um al-Shuqeef hill near the Palestinian refugee camp of Handarat that government forces captured from rebels earlier this week, according to state TV. The hill is on the northern edge of the Aleppo, Syria’s largest city and former commercial center.

The powerful ultraconservative Ahrar al-Sham militant group said rebels regained control Saturday of several positions they lost in Aleppo in the Bustan al-Basha neighborhood.

Statemedia said 13 people were wounded when rebels shelled the central government-held neighborhood of Midan.

Airstrikes on Aleppo struck a hospital in the eastern rebel-held neighborhood of Sakhour, putting it out of service, according to the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights and the Local Coordination Committees. They said one person was killed in the airstrike.

Opposition activist Ahmad Alkhatib described the hospital, known asM10, as one of the largest in Aleppo.

He posted photographs on his Twitter account showing the damage.

A doctor at the hospital told the Aleppo Media Center, an activist collective, that thousands of people were treated in the compound in the past, adding that two people were killed in Saturday’s airstrikes and several were wounded.

“A real catastrophe will hit medical institutions in Aleppo if the direct shelling continues to target hospitals and clinics,” said the doctor, whose name was not given. He said the whole hospital is out of service.

Opposition activists have blamed President Bashar Assad’s forces and Russia for airstrikes that hit Civil Defense units and clinics in the city, where eastern rebel-held neighborhoods are besieged by government forces and pro-government militiamen.

On Friday, the international medical humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders demanded that the Syrian government and its allies “halt the indiscriminate bombing that has killed and wounded hundreds of civilians, many of them children,” over the past week in Aleppo.

“Bombs are raining from Syrialed coalition planes and the whole of east Aleppo has become a giant kill box,” said Xisco Villalonga, director of operations for the group.

“The Syrian government must stop the indiscriminate bombing, and Russia, as an indispensable political and military ally of Syria has the responsibility to exert the pressure to stop this.”

ASSOCIATED PRESS FILE PHOTO A Syrian man holds a girl as he stands on the rubble of houses destroyed by Syrian government forces airstrikes in Aleppo, Syria, in 2014. On Saturday, airstrikes hit a hospital in a rebel-controlled portion of the city, killing at least one person.