Regime aircraft pounded rebel areas of Syria’s second city, Aleppo, which was left out of a deal to “freeze” fighting despite international outrage over renewed violence. Shelling and air raids in Aleppo over the past week have killed more than 230 civilians and pushed a landmark Feb. 27 ceasefire to the verge of collapse.
On Friday, crude barrel bombs smashed into residential neighborhoods as rescue workers scrambled to cope with the casualties.
Near the city’s eastern rebel-held Fardos District, the civil defense, known as the White Helmets, pulled bloodied bodies caked in dust from a building that had been hit. A reporter saw a distraught man cradling his wounded daughter, who appeared to be about 10 years old, in an ambulance.
Photo: Reuters
“My daughter, oh God, my daughter, please someone get in and drive,” he shouted.
After a rescue worker jumped into the driver’s seat, the young girl whimpered: “I’m going to die... I’m going to die.”
Some onlookers helped rescue workers remove rubble as others stared at the sky waiting for the next strike.
Bombardments of the city killed 17 people in rebel-held districts and 13 people in the government-controlled western neighborhoods, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
“The earth is shaking beneath our feet,” one resident of the densely populated Bustan al-Qasr area told reporters.
An air raid also hit a local clinic in rebel-held al-Maja neighborhood, wounding several people, including a nurse, the White Helmets said.
Medical charity Doctors Without Borders reported a clinic was “totally destroyed” but without casualties. It was not clear if it was the same facility.
According to the International Committee of the Red Cross, a total of four medical facilities were hit in Aleppo on Friday on both sides of the front line.
“There can be no justification for these appalling acts of violence deliberately targeting hospitals and clinics,” the committee’s head in Syria Marianne Gasser said.
“People keep dying in these attacks. There is no safe place anymore in Aleppo. Even in hospitals,” she said.
It was the second time this week that an air strike hit one of the few medical facilities still operating in rebel areas.
A raid on Wednesday hit al-Quds Hospital and nearby flats, killing 30 people in an attack UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon condemned as “inexcusable.”
Doctor Mohammad Wassim Maaz — known as the most qualified pediatrician in eastern Aleppo — was among the dead at the hospital.
Despite the carnage, Aleppo has been excluded from a fresh “freeze” in fighting brokered by the US and Russia.
Syria’s armed forces said that it was scheduled to begin at 1:00am yesterday and last for 24 hours in Damascus and the nearby rebel bastion of Eastern Ghouta, and 72 hours in the coastal Latakia Province.
A monitor said fighters had laid down their arms on both fronts. “It’s quiet in Latakia and in eastern Ghouta. There is no shelling at the moment,” Observatory head Rami Abdel Rahman told reporters.
UN special envoy for Syria Michael Ratney said the agreement was a “general recommitment” to the original truce, “not a new set of local ceasefires.”
A Syrian security source said the deal was brokered by the US and Russia, but that Moscow had refused a request by Washington to include Aleppo.
US Secretary of State John Kerry called his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov to discuss “keeping and reinforcing” the broader ceasefire, the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs said.
“We want to focus on strengthening the cessation of hostilities, renewing it, reaffirming it, so that we can quell the fighting or the violations,” US Department of State spokesman Mark Toner told reporters.
The High Negotiations Committee — Syria’s main opposition group — condemned the growing violence in Aleppo in a letter to Ban.
The committee earlier this month walked out of UN-backed peace talks in Geneva in frustration at the increasing bloodshed.
“It’s not an appropriate time to talk about a political process in the wake of the horrific massacres and the systematic violations of the truce, which has no real presence on the ground,” committee chief Riad Hijab said on Twitter.
UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein on Friday slammed world powers backing opposing sides in Syria, saying the renewed violence showed a “monstrous disregard for civilian lives.”
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