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Aleppo / AFP
Huge blazes erupted in Syria’s Aleppo as the city was rocked by fighting and air strikes on Thursday, ahead of last-ditch efforts by world powers to salvage a failed ceasefire.
The truce deal brokered by Moscow and Washington fell apart earlier this week, ushering in a surge of fighting on all major fronts of Syria’s five-year civil war.
Heavy clashes gripped the outskirts of Aleppo on Thursday, after air strikes triggered major fires across the city’s devastated rebel-held districts.
An AFP correspondent in the eastern Bustan al-Qasr neighbourhood reported that his entire street was in flames following the pre-dawn strikes.
Volunteer firefighters battled throughout the night to contain the blazes, which local activists at the Aleppo Media Centre said were caused by “incendiary phosphorous bombs.”
In footage posted by the group, a ball of flames shoots up over the city, lighting up the skyline and sparking fires on the horizon.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said 14 strikes on the rebel-held neighbourhoods of Bustan al-Qasr and Al-Kalasseh “led to massive fires” overnight.
Observatory head Rami Abdel Rahman said they were “the most intense strikes in months” on those two districts and that they had killed seven people, including three women and three children.
Widespread clashes
The Britain-based monitor also reported fierce clashes in Aleppo’s southwestern district of Ramussa, where rebel groups are fighting off a government offensive.
Fighting was also reported on Thursday in the central provinces of Homs and Hama, and east of Damascus in the opposition stronghold of Eastern Ghouta.
As violence escalated on the ground, diplomatic efforts were set to continue in New York with a new meeting of the International Syria Support Group (ISSG) on Thursday.
Dozens of rebels quit Homs under deal with govt
More than 120 rebels and dozens of their relatives left the last rebel-held district of Syria’s Homs city under a deal with the regime, the governor said.
The group was the second wave of fighters to leave the Waer neighbourhood under an agreement reached between opposition and government forces in December.
The United Nations oversaw the original deal but was not present during Thursday’s operation, and its decision to stay away delayed the evacuation, which had been due to start Monday.
Homs governor Talal Barazi told reporters that “123 armed men and 157 civilians from the families of the armed men left to northern Homs province”.
Syria talks could resume in a ‘few weeks’: UN
Geneva / AFP
The UN’s deputy envoy for Syria said on Thursday that he hoped peace talks could resume in the coming weeks, despite “grim” events on the ground.
Ramzy Ezzeldin Ramzy said his boss, UN envoy Staffan de Mistura, was in discussion with warring parties to organise “direct negotiations”, a departure from past rounds where the sides met separately with moderators.
The UN is working “with a view to holding these talks hopefully in the next few weeks.”
De Mistura’s recent target dates to relaunch talks have all been missed, amid a failure to contain the fighting.
While the UN has said it would clearly be preferrable to host talks with a ceasefire in place, future negotiations should not have preconditions.
The latest truce agreed by the United States and Russia has collapsed, but Ramzy insisted both Washington and Moscow “are determined to make the agreement work.”
Regardless of the setbacks, the UN “will never give up on the political process” to end Syria’s five-year war, he added.
UN resumes Syria aid convoys
Geneva / AFP
UN aid convoys starting rolling in Syria again on Thursday, after a deadly attack on humanitarian trucks and a warehouse triggered a suspension in deliveries.
“Today we are sending an inter-agency, cross-line convoy with urgently needed aid to people in a besieged area of rural Damascus,” United Nations humanitarian agency (OCHA) spokesman Jens Laerke said in a statement.
“We have resumed aid deliveries based on the humanitarian imperative,” he added.
Laerke said in an email that this was the first convoy to head towards a besieged area since Monday’s attack on a humanitarian convoy which killed around 20 people, including a Red Cross staffer.
Kerry, Lavrov discuss Syria in New York
Moscow / AFP
Russia and the United States discussed the Syrian conflict in New York, hours after clashing over the issue at the United Nations, the Russian foreign ministry said on Thursday. US Secretary of State John Kerry and his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov talked first by telephone “at the initiative of the Americans”, the ministry said in a message on Facebook.
The diplomats then met, accompanied by their delegations, “to continue discussing the problem of a settlement (of the conflict) in Syria.”
Russia and the United States negotiated the latest ceasefire plan, but Syria ended the truce on Monday following an apparently accidental US-led coalition strike on Syrian soldiers.