Aleppo city pummelled as Putin, Assad ignore US plea

Warplanes mounted the heaviest airstrikes in months against rebel-held districts of the city of Aleppo overnight, as Russia and the Syrian government spurned a US plea to halt flights, burying any hope for the revival of a doomed cease-fire.
Rebel officials and rescue workers said incendiary bombs were among the weapons that rained from the sky on the city. Hamza Al-Khatib, the director of a hospital in the rebel-held east, told Reuters the death toll was 45.
“It’s as if the planes are trying to compensate for all the days they didn’t drop bombs” during the cease-fire, Ammar Al-Selmo, the head of the civil defense rescue service in opposition-held eastern Aleppo told Reuters.
“It was like there was coordination between the planes and the artillery shelling, because the shells were hitting the same locations that the planes hit,” he said.
The assault, by aircraft from the Syrian government, its Russian allies or both, made clear that Moscow and Damascus had rejected a plea by US Secretary of State John Kerry to halt flights so that aid could be delivered and a cease-fire salvaged.
In a tense televised exchange with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov at the United Nations on Wednesday, Kerry said stopping the bombardment was the last chance to find a way “out of the carnage.”
President Bashar Assad meanwhile indicated he saw no quick end to the war, telling AP News it would “drag on” as long as it is part of a global conflict in which terrorists were backed ...
A senior official in the Levant Front, an Aleppo-based rebel group, told Reuters: “The Russians only want surrender. They have no other solution.”
In another sign of the Syrian government’s determination to seize and hold more territory, it pressed on with the evacuation of rebel fighters from the last opposition-held district of Homs, which would complete the government’s recapture of the central city, now largely reduced to ruins.
The United Nations announced that it was resuming aid deliveries to rebel-held areas on Thursday following a 48-hour suspension to review security guarantees after Monday’s attack on an aid convoy near Aleppo that killed around 20 people.
“We are sending today an inter-agency convoy that will cross conflict lines into a besieged area of rural Damascus,” Jens Laerke, spokesman of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), told Reuters.
Also, a “minister” in Syria’s opposition government was among at least 12 people killed in a car bomb attack in the south of the country, officials said.

Source: Arab News