BEIRUT, Washington Post, Dec. 13, 2016 – Dozens of people were executed by Syrian government loyalists sweeping through the remaining opposition-held districts of Aleppo, where rebels are battling for survival after being pushed into a last sliver of territory, the United Nations says.
Rupert Colville, a spokesman for the U.N. human rights agency, said his office in Geneva received reports that Syrian soldiers and allied Iraqi militia have killed at least 82 civilians, entering homes and killing people “on the spot.”
Others were reportedly shot as they fled. A list of names provided to the United Nations included 11 women and 13 children, he said.
The reports of summary executions of civilians and apparent house-by-house rampages reflected the chaos gripping the strategic northern city as forces supporting President Bashar al-Assad have steadily pushed rebels into a patch of territory covering less than three square miles.
“A complete meltdown of humanity in Aleppo,” said Jens Laerke, the U.N. humanitarian spokesman, citing reports from a Syrian volunteer rescue group known as the White Helmets.

Images from inside the besieged Syrian city that is divided between government and rebel control.
“It’s hell,” he added.

A rebel defeat in Aleppo would hand a major battlefield prize to Assad. It would also usher the war into a reckoning phase, with an array of rebel forces boxed together in a single province, and the potential for splits to emerge between Assad and his Iranian and Russian backers. Both Iran and Russia are likely to want a key role in defining the war’s endgame.

[Cries from embattled Aleppo: “No place now to go”]

International aid agencies urged government forces Tuesday to refrain from acts of revenge against people who either escape rebel-held areas or are captured there.
“Thousands of civilians’ lives are in danger as front lines close in around them,” said a statement from the International Committee of the Red Cross. “A deepening humanitarian catastrophe and further loss of life can be averted only if the basic rules of warfare — and of humanity — are applied.”

When rebel forces seized Aleppo’s eastern districts in 2012, they envisaged the area as a seat of power to rival the capital, Damascus. Its loss, now inevitable, will deal a crushing blow from which the armed groups probably would not be able to recover.
Almost a month after pro-Assad troops launched a final push to take back the city, the rebels’ collapse came swiftly. By late afternoon Monday, their final districts were falling like dominoes, sparking jubilation in the streets of some government-held areas.
Thousands of civilians have escaped the last handful of neighborhoods still controlled by the rebels. In fierce fighting overnight, the remaining rebels managed to stave off further government advances.
Syrian state television showed thousands of people streaming into the government-held part of the city clutching possessions and bags.
But when the sun rose Tuesday, the fighting appeared to have slowed as rain and thunderstorms made it difficult for warplanes to fly.
In a video posted to the livestreaming site Periscope, Abdulkafi al-Hamdo, an English teacher, addressed viewers from an empty street. “Now it is raining. Bombs a little bit calmer,” he said. “We wanted freedom. We didn’t want anything else but freedom. You know, this world doesn’t like freedom, it seems.”
Thousands more were still trapped in the rebel-held areas, refusing to leave because they fear for their safety at the hands of government troops, said Zouhir al-Shimale, an activist who is still living under rebel control.
“We’re in a very tiny area, and there are so many families stuck here,” he said. “Either they can’t leave because they are wanted by the government or they don’t want to leave because this is their home.”
Friends who escaped to the east have told him that men who leave are being separated from the others who are fleeing and taken to serve in the depleted Syrian army, one of the reasons he is not leaving the enclave.
In Berlin, French President François Hollande repeated Western appeals for Russia to help create a humanitarian aid for civilians trapped in Aleppo.
Hollande, after meeting German Chancellor Angela Merkel, said Aleppo’s “humanitarian situation . . . is unacceptable.”