Reuters, Aug 20, 2016 – Russian warships in the Mediterranean Sea fired cruise missiles at targets near Aleppo on Friday, a further sign of Moscow’s broadening military effort in Syria days after it began to fly bombing missions from an airbase in Iran.

Russian air power had helped Syrian President Bashar al-Assad make steady advances against rebels seeking to oust him since Moscow’s intervention a year ago, but a recent insurgent advance in Aleppo has checked that momentum.

In northeastern Syria, warplanes from a U.S.-led coalition flew patrols on Thursday to protect local ground forces they back against Syrian government airstrikes that are targeting the Kurdish city of Hasaka, the Pentagon said.

Captain Jeff Davis

“The Syrian regime would be well advised not to interfere with coalition forces or our partners,” Pentagon spokesman Captain Jeff Davis said.

Russia’s three cruise missile launches were its first against targets in Syria from the Mediterranean, with previous ones made from its Caspian Sea fleet. On Tuesday Russian bombers began flying missions in Syria from Hamedan air base in Iran.

The upsurge in fighting and airstrikes in and around the city, split between government-held west and rebel-held eastern sectors, has prompted growing international concern, galvanized by pictures on Thursday of a dazed, bloodied child.

The plight of civilians in Aleppo has been aggravated in besieged areas by dire shortages of basic goods, leading the World Food Program to warn of a “nightmarish” situation.

In Daraya, a suburb of Damascus, rebels and a war monitor said the Syrian army’s helicopters had dropped incendiary barrel bombs early on Friday, putting the opposition-held town’s only hospital out of action.

On Thursday Russia, Assad’s most powerful military ally, said it supported a proposal for a weekly 48-hour pause in fighting in Aleppo to allow aid to reach the besieged areas and that it was ready to start the first one next week.

On Friday, the main umbrella group for the Syrian opposition also cautiously welcomed the idea provided the U.N. monitored the truce and enforced compliance. During a previous humanitarian pause this year, both sides complained the other had broken the truce as fighting escalated again.

ALEPPO TRUCE

Rebel groups stormed a Syrian army complex in southwest Aleppo two weeks ago, breaking a siege on opposition-held parts of Aleppo and prompting fierce counter-attacks.
A senior rebel commander said there was a “positive atmosphere” surrounding talk of a ceasefire. “But so far there are no details.”

Syrian warplanes had carried out 46 sorties in the last 24 hours, including strikes in Aleppo that destroyed a tank, a vehicle loaded with ammunition and three mortar emplacements, and killed dozens of rebel fighters, a military source said.

“Rami Abdulrahman, head of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights

Continuing clashes between rebels and the Syrian army and allied militias were fiercest in the southwest of city, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a U.K.-based monitor of the five-year-old civil war, said on Friday.

It added that air strikes and shelling in and around Aleppo had killed 422 civilians, including 142 children, this month.

 Bettina Luescher

“We need a 48-hour pause, we need it now,” WFP spokeswoman Bettina Luescher told a briefing in Geneva on Friday. While the rebel advance this month opened a narrow corridor into opposition-held areas of Aleppo, access remains very limited and dangerous, meaning aid supplies are scarce.
“It’s crucially important that we go in there because people are absolutely desperate,” Luescher added. “From both sides, these sieges have to stop – it’s inhumane, awful, disgusting, nightmarish. Not necessarily U.N. words, but that’s what it is.”