At least 200 people died in six days of bombings amid a failing ceasefire

The last pediatrician in rebel-held Aleppo has been killed in a Syrian regime air strike on a hospital which claimed the lives of as many as 30 others.
Dr Muhammad Wassim Maaz, five colleagues and at least four children being treated at the hospital in the district of Sukkari were killed when it was hit by four direct strikes just before midnight on Wednesday.
The al-Quds hospital, which is supported by Doctors without Borders (MSF) and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), is one of few remaining to residents in the opposition-controlled areas around eastern Aleppo.
 

An injured woman reacts at a site hit by airstrikes in the rebel held area of Old Aleppo.

MSF said the 34-bed, multi-story hospital was the main referral centre for pediatric care and had an ER, an intensive care unit and an operating theatre, which had all been destroyed.
Eight doctors and 28 nurses worked full time in the hospital, said MSF, which has supported the hospital since 2012.
Another of the victims was a nurse named only as Safaa, who was killed along with her husband and two children, and the hospital’s dentist Dr Mohamed Ahmad.
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on Thursday condemned the bombing of the hospital and said attacks that target civilians are “inexcusable” violations of humanitarian law.
“There must be accountability for these crimes,” Mr Ban said in a statement.
the UN’s Jan Egeland, who heads an international humanitarian taskforce for war-ravaged Syria, spoke of a “catastrophic deterioration” of the situation in the country.
 

Children walk amid the rubbles of destroyed buildings after air strikes on the rebel-held neighbourhood of al-Kalasa in Aleppo

Volunteer rescue team The White Helmets were continuing to dig through the debris on Thursday evening in an attempt to locate and recover survivors.
“It hit in the middle of the night,” one rescuer told the Telegraph. “The children were sleeping in their beds – we think some of them are still missing under the rubble.”
A video posted online showed a number of lifeless bodies, including those of children, being pulled out from a building and loaded into ambulances amid screaming and wailing.
Distraught rescue workers trying to keep onlookers away from the scene, apparently fearing more airstrikes.
 

Syrian civil defence volunteers evacuate a baby from a destroyed building

Relief International charity said: “Dr Wassim was the last pediatrician in Aleppo and a respected member of our extended team. We grieve for him and the two colleagues we lost.”
Days earlier five members of the White Helmets were killed when war planes bombed the city of al-Atarib, west of Aleppo.
Mohammed Alloush, the political leader of the main opposition group Jaysh al-Islam (Army of Islam), said in response to the hospital bombing: “Whoever carries out these massacres needs a war tribunal and a court of justice to be tried for his crimes. He does not need a negotiating table,” referring to Bashar al-Assad.
An uptick in fighting around Aleppo, the country’s former commercial hub where some 250,000 still live, has killed at least 186 people from both sides since Friday and threatened to finish off the fragile ceasefire once and for all.
Rebels have controlled eastern districts of Aleppo since 2012, confining the government to the west.
The regime, backed by Russian warplanes, is preparing to launch a much larger offensive in the coming days to retake the whole of Aleppo, which is Syria’s largest city and the most important for the government to reclaim.
The ICRC warned that the northern Syrian city is on the brink of a humanitarian disaster as a result of renewed fighting there.
They said in a statement on Thursday that the fighting is putting millions at grave risk.
Stocks of contingency food and medical aid are expected to run out soon and warned that an escalation in fighting means that they cannot be replenished.
 

The White Helmets have been braving the continued bombing in an effort to drag people from the rubble

The air strikes came just as Staffan de Mistura, the UN envoy for Syria begged co-sponsors US and Russia to help revive peace talks and a ceasefire which he said “hangs by a thread”.
The Geneva talks are deadlocked over the key question of Assad’s future. The main tenet of the opposition’s demands is for him to step down, while the government say his role is not up for negotiation.
De Mistura is talking about May 14-15 for starting the next round. “But it is very, very theoretical,” the Western diplomat said. “It is not at all a given that the two parties will return to Geneva.”

Syrian government solely behind Aleppo hospital strike: United States
 
  

 
Indications are that Syria’s government was solely responsible for an air strike on a hospital in Aleppo, the US State Department said on Thursday, urging Russia to use its influence to pressure Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to stop the attacks.

State Department spokesman John Kirby said Washington was still learning more about the attack on Wednesday night that killed children and doctors at the hospital supported by Doctors Without Borders. “The indications that we have now are that these strikes were conducted solely by the regime,” Kirby said. He denied statements by the Russian Defence Ministry that a plane belonging to the US-led coalition was seen over Aleppo on Wednesday evening.
Kirby said Moscow still wielded influence over Assad. “We’re not at the point where we’d say they don’t have influence over Assad,” Kirby said, adding: “What’s curious and what we’d like to know more is to what degree are they actually assertively, aggressively using that influence right now because on the face of it … it would appear that influence isn’t being asserted as energetically as we believe it could be.”

The city of Aleppo has been at the epicentre of a military escalation undermining peace talks in Geneva to end the five-year-old war. UN envoy Staffan de Mistura appealed to the presidents of the United States (US) and Russia to intervene. Kirby said the Syrian cessation of hostilities was “very much in peril” because of the violations and urged Moscow to use its influence over Assad to halt the attacks.

Source: News Media, 29 APRIL 2016