Reuters, Beirut :The Syrian army advanced towards the Turkish border on Monday in a major offensive backed by Russia and Iran that rebels say now threatens the future of their nearly five-year-old insurrection against President Bashar al-Assad.Iranian backed-militias played a key role on the ground as Russian jets intensified what rebels call a scorched earth policy that has allowed the military back into the strategic northern area for the first time in more than two years.”Our whole existence is now threatened, not just losing more ground,” said Abdul Rahim al-Najdawi from Liwa al-Tawheed, an insurgent group. “They are advancing and we are pulling back because in the face of such heavy aerial bombing we must minimise our losses.”The Russian-backed Syrian government advance over recent days amounts to one of the biggest shifts in momentum of the war, helping to torpedo the first peace talks for two years, which collapsed last week before they had begun in earnest.The Syrian military and its allies were almost five km from the rebel-held town of Tal Rafaat, which has brought them to around 25 km from the Turkish border, the rebels, residents and a conflict monitor said.The assault around the city of Aleppo in northern Syria has prompted tens of thousands to flee towards Turkey, already sheltering more than 2.5 million Syrians.In the last two days escalating Russian bombardment of towns northwest of Aleppo, Anadan and Haritan, brought several thousand more, according to a resident in the town of Azaz.Aleppo, Syria’s largest city before the war with 2 million people, has been divided for years into rebel and government-held sections. The government wants to take full control, which would be its biggest prize yet in a war that has already killed at least 250,000 people and driven 11 million from their homes.Rebel-held areas in and around Aleppo are still home to 350,000 people, and aid workers have said they could soon fall to the government. Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan was quoted at the weekend as saying Turkey was under threat, and Ankara has so far kept the border crossing there closed to most refugees.After around a week of heavy Russian air strikes, Syrian government troops and their allies broke through rebel defences to reach two Shia towns in northern Aleppo province on Wednesday, choking opposition supply lines from Turkey.German Chancellor Angela Merkel said she was “appalled” by the suffering of Aleppo, blaming primarily Russian bombing and suggesting it violated a UN Security Council resolution Moscow signed in December.Kerem Kinik, Vice President of the Turkish Red Crescent, told reporters at the Oncupinar border crossing that Syrians were fleeing Russian strikes in panic. The closure of the road to Aleppo risked a much larger scale repeat of crises in Ghouta, a besieged Damascus suburb, or even Madaya, a blockaded town were residents have starved. “The route to Aleppo is completely closed and this is a road that was feeding all the main arteries inside Syria.Another report adds: More than one million Syrians are trapped in besieged areas, a new report says in a challenge to the United Nations, which estimates just half that amount and has been accused by some aid groups of underplaying a crisis.The fate of Syria’s besieged is at the heart of peace talks that quickly fell apart last week in Geneva and are set to resume by Feb. 25. Negotiators for the opposition had insisted that the Syrian government stop besieging civilians before talks could truly begin.The new Siege Watch report, issued Tuesday by the Netherlands-based aid group PAX and the Washington-based Syria Institute, comes a month after images posted online of emaciated children and adults led to an international outcry and rare convoys of aid to a handful of Syrian communities.The town featured in the images, Madaya, was not listed by the U.N. as a besieged community at the time. Aid workers who entered last month reported seeing skeletal people and parents who gave their children sleeping pills to calm their hunger.The Siege Watch report says 1.09 million people are living in 46 besieged communities in Syria, far more than the 18 listed by the U.N. It says most are besieged by the Syrian government in the suburbs of Damascus, the capital, and Homs. In the eastern city of Deir el-Zour, about 200,000 people are besieged by both the Islamic State group and the Syrian government. The report lists two communities besieged by armed opposition groups.”Electricity and running water are usually cut off, and there is limited (if any) access to food, fuel, and medical care,” the report says. Deaths have been reported from malnutrition, disease, hypothermia and poisoning while scavenging for food. Some communities have been besieged for months or years.The estimates are based largely on information provided by local contacts in the communities, including local councils, medical workers and citizen journalists.With the spotlight on the besieged, the United Nations last month raised its estimate by almost 100,000, saying that 486,700 people are affected.That’s still less than some aid groups and others estimate. They argue that the world body’s numbers set the tone for humanitarian response efforts and that more urgency is needed.”Many remain unaware of the extent of the crisis, and the international response has been muted as a result,” the Siege Watch report says.In meetings this week with U.N. officials and member states, PAX says it will call for the immediate lifting of sieges as a way to build confidence in the peace talks. Syria Institute executive director Valerie Szybala said the new report has not been shared with Syria’s government.The U.N. says it considers an area besieged if three criteria are met: The area is surrounded by “armed actors,” humanitarian aid cannot regularly enter, and civilians, including the sick and wounded, cannot enter and exit.”Of course, differences of opinion do occur,” Amanda Pitt, a U.N. humanitarian spokeswoman, said of criticism of the U.N.’s estimates.The aid group Doctors Without Borders goes well beyond the figure in the Siege Watch report, estimating that 1.9 million Syrians live in besieged areas.Doctors Without Borders said it defines Syria’s besieged areas as ones “that are surrounded by strategic barriers (military or non-military) that prevent the regular and safe inflow of humanitarian assistance and the regular and safe outflow of civilians, the wounded and the sick.”The United Nations places an estimated 4.5 million Syrians into a separate category called “hard to reach,” a step below besieged. It defines that as “an area that is not regularly accessible to humanitarian actors for the purpose of sustained humanitarian programming as a result of denial of access.”
