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Thousands flee onslaught as Aleppo battle reaches climax

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ALEPPO: Thousands of people fled the front lines of fighting in Aleppo on Tuesday as the Syrian military hammered the final pocket of rebel resistance and Russia rejected an immediate ceasefire.


The rout of rebels from their ever-shrinking territory in Aleppo sparked a mass flight of civilians and insurgents in bitter weather, a crisis the United Nations said was a “complete meltdown of humanity” with civilians being shot dead.


The UN human rights office said it had reports of abuses, including that the army and allied Iraqi militiamen summarily killed at least 82 civilians in captured districts of the city, once a flourishing economic centre with renowned ancient sites.


“The reports we had are of people being shot in the street trying to flee and shot in their homes,” said Rupert Colville, spokesman for the UN office. “There could be many more.”


Behind those fleeing was a wasteland of flattened buildings, concrete rubble and bullet-pocked walls, where tens of thousands had lived until recent days under intense bombardment even after medical and rescue services had collapsed. Colville said the rebel-held area was “a hellish corner” of less than a square kilometre, adding its capture was imminent. The Syrian army and its allies are in the “last moments before declaring victory” in Aleppo, a Syrian military source said, after rebel defences collapsed, leaving insurgents in a tiny, heavily bombarded pocket of ground.


Turkish and Russian officials will meet on Wednesday to examine a possible ceasefire and opening a corridor, a senior Turkish official, who declined to be identified, said.


But Moscow, the Syrian government’s most powerful ally, rejected any immediate call for a ceasefire. “The Russian side wants to do that only when the corridors are established,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said.


The spokesman for the civil defence force in the former rebel area of Aleppo said rebels now controlled an area of less than three sq km. “The situation is very, very bad. The civil defence has stopped operating in the city,” he said.


A surrender or withdrawal of the rebels from Aleppo would mean the end of the rebellion in the city, Syria’s largest until the outbreak of war after mass protests in 2011, but it is unclear if such a deal can be struck by world powers.


By finally dousing the last embers of resistance burning in Aleppo, Syrian President Bashar al Assad’s military coalition of the army, Russian air power and militias will have delivered him his biggest battlefield victory of the war.


However, while the rebels, as well as terror groups that the West does not support, will suffer a crushing defeat in Aleppo, the war will be far from over.


Aleppo’s loss will leave the rebels without a significant presence in any of Syria’s main cities, but they still hold much of the countryside west of Aleppo and the province of Idlib, also in northwest Syria.


IS also has a big presence in Syria and has advanced in recent days, taking the desert city of Palmyra.


However, rocket fire pounded rebel-held areas, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a British-based war monitor, reported. Rebels and government forces still fought at points around the reduced enclave, the Observatory said.


The UN children’s agency Unicef cited an unnamed doctor in Aleppo as saying that many unaccompanied children were trapped in a building that was under attack. — Reuters


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