Middle East Eye :
Syrian troops moved into east Aleppo on Thursday ahead of a push into the most densely populated areas, as government ally Russia called for corridors to bring in aid and evacuate wounded.
Despite global criticism including the UN warning Aleppo risked becoming a “giant graveyard”, government forces have pressed an assault to retake control of the divided city.
The artillery-backed offensive has spurred an exodus of tens of thousands of residents from the rebel-held east.
It has left Aleppo’s streets strewn with the bodies of men, women and children, many lying next to the suitcases they had packed to escape. Artillery fire continued on Thursday but subsided as heavy rainfall hit the city. The assault has seen President Bashar al-Assad’s forces make significant gains in the past week. After overrunning the city’s northeast, they were in control of 40 percent of the territory once held by opposition forces in Aleppo, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. “The regime is tightening the noose on the remaining section of east Aleppo under rebel control,” Observatory head Rami Abdel Rahman told AFP.
He said hundreds of fighters from Syria’s elite Republican Guard and Fourth Division arrived in Aleppo on Thursday “in preparation for street battles” in the densely populated southeast. “They are moving in on the ground, but they are afraid of ambushes because of the density of both residents and fighters,” he said. On Thursday, Russia proposed setting up four humanitarian corridors into east Aleppo to bring in aid and evacuate severely wounded people, after holding talks with Syrian rebel groups in Turkey.
Russia announced “they want to sit down in Aleppo with our people there to discuss how we can use the four (humanitarian) corridors to evacuate people out”, Jan Egeland, head of the UN-backed humanitarian taskforce for Syria, told reporters in Geneva. He said Russia has pledged to respect the corridors, and that “we (the UN) now feel confident that the armed opposition groups will do the same”. Moscow has announced several humanitarian pauses in Aleppo to allow civilians to flee, but until the recent military escalation, only a handful did so. In Turkey on Thursday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Moscow had used every opportunity to help civilians, but accused rebels of threatening “to prevent passage of humanitarian convoys and fire on them”.
Russia was criticised at Wednesday’s UN Security Council meeting on Syria, with British ambassador Matthew Rycroft accusing Moscow of supporting “a deliberate act of starvation and a deliberate withholding of medical care”. Since Saturday more than 50,000 people have poured out of east Aleppo into territory controlled by government forces or local Kurdish authorities, according to the Observatory.
Thousands more have sought refuge in the remaining rebel-held neighbourhoods in southeastern Aleppo, arriving with overpacked suitcases or sometimes just the clothes on their backs.
Meanwhile, more than 200 humanitarian and human rights groups called on Thursday for the UN General Assembly to address Syria’s deadly conflict, citing the Security Council’s paralysis in dealing with the crisis.
In a declaration published in New York, the 223 signatories said the Security Council “has failed Syrians” and particularly pointed out its inability to stop the Syrian government’s offensive against east Aleppo.
They called for the 193 member nations of the United Nations “to request an emergency special session of the UN General Assembly to demand an end to all unlawful attacks in Aleppo and elsewhere in Syria, and immediate and unhindered humanitarian access” to besieged civilians.
The UN members also should find a way to bring those responsible for serious crimes under international law in Syria to justice, the declaration said. Under a 1950 resolution dubbed “Uniting for Peace”, the General Assembly adopted the authority to skirt the Security Council when it proves incapable of preserving peace and international security.
The resolution has been invoked eight times in efforts to resolve crises where the Security Council is at impasse, such as in the Korean crisis in 1950, the Congo in 1960 and Afghanistan in 1980 following the Russian invasion. But the powers of the resolution are limited, and its results have been mixed.
Since the Syrian conflict began in March 2011, Russia has wielded its Security Council veto on Syria-related resolutions five times, and China has done so four times.
Unlike the 15-member Security Council, there is no veto in the General Assembly, but its decisions are not binding. The General Assembly, however, can put pressure on countries to act unilaterally: an assembly resolution in 1981, for example, spurred certain countries to impose sanctions on apartheid-era South Africa.
The initiative on Thursday by civil society organisations joins an effort launched by Canada, which has already mobilised 73 countries to demand an emergency special session of the General Assembly on Syria.
That meeting should be held “at the earliest opportunity, as UN member states have done in the past when the Security Council was deadlocked”, the organisations said. Among the groups from 45 countries that signed the declaration are Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Oxfam, CARE International, Save the Children and 63 Syrian organisations. France, which has gathered the support of about 100 countries, is spearheading a movement aimed at linking Security Council veto power to moral issues.
The veto should not be used in cases of mass atrocities, when the need for action is urgent, the French government argues.
Despite global criticism including the UN warning Aleppo risked becoming a “giant graveyard”, government forces have pressed an assault to retake control of the divided city.
The artillery-backed offensive has spurred an exodus of tens of thousands of residents from the rebel-held east.
It has left Aleppo’s streets strewn with the bodies of men, women and children, many lying next to the suitcases they had packed to escape. Artillery fire continued on Thursday but subsided as heavy rainfall hit the city. The assault has seen President Bashar al-Assad’s forces make significant gains in the past week. After overrunning the city’s northeast, they were in control of 40 percent of the territory once held by opposition forces in Aleppo, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. “The regime is tightening the noose on the remaining section of east Aleppo under rebel control,” Observatory head Rami Abdel Rahman told AFP.
He said hundreds of fighters from Syria’s elite Republican Guard and Fourth Division arrived in Aleppo on Thursday “in preparation for street battles” in the densely populated southeast. “They are moving in on the ground, but they are afraid of ambushes because of the density of both residents and fighters,” he said. On Thursday, Russia proposed setting up four humanitarian corridors into east Aleppo to bring in aid and evacuate severely wounded people, after holding talks with Syrian rebel groups in Turkey.
Russia announced “they want to sit down in Aleppo with our people there to discuss how we can use the four (humanitarian) corridors to evacuate people out”, Jan Egeland, head of the UN-backed humanitarian taskforce for Syria, told reporters in Geneva. He said Russia has pledged to respect the corridors, and that “we (the UN) now feel confident that the armed opposition groups will do the same”. Moscow has announced several humanitarian pauses in Aleppo to allow civilians to flee, but until the recent military escalation, only a handful did so. In Turkey on Thursday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Moscow had used every opportunity to help civilians, but accused rebels of threatening “to prevent passage of humanitarian convoys and fire on them”.
Russia was criticised at Wednesday’s UN Security Council meeting on Syria, with British ambassador Matthew Rycroft accusing Moscow of supporting “a deliberate act of starvation and a deliberate withholding of medical care”. Since Saturday more than 50,000 people have poured out of east Aleppo into territory controlled by government forces or local Kurdish authorities, according to the Observatory.
Thousands more have sought refuge in the remaining rebel-held neighbourhoods in southeastern Aleppo, arriving with overpacked suitcases or sometimes just the clothes on their backs.
Meanwhile, more than 200 humanitarian and human rights groups called on Thursday for the UN General Assembly to address Syria’s deadly conflict, citing the Security Council’s paralysis in dealing with the crisis.
In a declaration published in New York, the 223 signatories said the Security Council “has failed Syrians” and particularly pointed out its inability to stop the Syrian government’s offensive against east Aleppo.
They called for the 193 member nations of the United Nations “to request an emergency special session of the UN General Assembly to demand an end to all unlawful attacks in Aleppo and elsewhere in Syria, and immediate and unhindered humanitarian access” to besieged civilians.
The UN members also should find a way to bring those responsible for serious crimes under international law in Syria to justice, the declaration said. Under a 1950 resolution dubbed “Uniting for Peace”, the General Assembly adopted the authority to skirt the Security Council when it proves incapable of preserving peace and international security.
The resolution has been invoked eight times in efforts to resolve crises where the Security Council is at impasse, such as in the Korean crisis in 1950, the Congo in 1960 and Afghanistan in 1980 following the Russian invasion. But the powers of the resolution are limited, and its results have been mixed.
Since the Syrian conflict began in March 2011, Russia has wielded its Security Council veto on Syria-related resolutions five times, and China has done so four times.
Unlike the 15-member Security Council, there is no veto in the General Assembly, but its decisions are not binding. The General Assembly, however, can put pressure on countries to act unilaterally: an assembly resolution in 1981, for example, spurred certain countries to impose sanctions on apartheid-era South Africa.
The initiative on Thursday by civil society organisations joins an effort launched by Canada, which has already mobilised 73 countries to demand an emergency special session of the General Assembly on Syria.
That meeting should be held “at the earliest opportunity, as UN member states have done in the past when the Security Council was deadlocked”, the organisations said. Among the groups from 45 countries that signed the declaration are Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Oxfam, CARE International, Save the Children and 63 Syrian organisations. France, which has gathered the support of about 100 countries, is spearheading a movement aimed at linking Security Council veto power to moral issues.
The veto should not be used in cases of mass atrocities, when the need for action is urgent, the French government argues.
