Hundreds of thousands of civilians could be cut off from food if Syrian government forces encircle rebel-held parts of Aleppo, the United Nations said on Tuesday, warning of a massive new exodus of refugees fleeing a Russian-backed assault.
Syrian government forces, backed by Russian air strikes and Iranian and Lebanese Hezbollah fighters, have launched a major offensive in the countryside around Aleppo, which has been divided between government and rebel control for years.
It amounts to one of the most important shifts of momentum in the five year civil war that has killed 250,000 people and already driven 11 million from their homes.
Since last week, fighting has already wrecked the first attempt at peace talks for two years and led rebel fighters to speak about losing their northern power base altogether.
The United Nations is worried the government advance could cut off the last link for civilians in rebel-held parts of Aleppo with the main Turkish border crossing, which has long served as the lifeline for insurgent-controlled territory.
“It would leave up to 300,000 people, still residing in the city, cut off from humanitarian aid unless cross-line access could be negotiated,” the United Nations Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said in an urgent bulletin.
If government advances around the city continue, it said, “local councils in the city estimate that some 100,000 – 150,000 civilians may flee”. Aleppo was once Syria’s biggest city, home to 2 million people. Air strikes continued on Tal Rafaat, Anadan and other towns in the Aleppo countryside, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which monitors violence in the war, and activists said, adding that they were almost certainly from Russian planes. Turkey, already home to 2.5 million Syrians, the world’s biggest refugee population, has so far kept its frontier mostly closed to the latest wave of displaced, making it more difficult to reach them with urgently needed aid.
Trucks ferrying aid and building supplies were crossing the border at Oncupinar into Syria on Tuesday, while a few ambulances entered Turkey, sirens blazing. But the crossing remained closed to the tens of thousands of refugees sheltering in camps on the Syrian side of the border. “We Syrians will be stuck between two evils if Turkey does not open the doors,” said Khaled, 30, trying to return to Aleppo to rescue his wife and children. “We will have to choose between Russian bombardment or Daesh,” he said, using a pejorative Arabic acronym for Islamic State. The United Nations urged Ankara on Tuesday to open the border and has called on other countries to assist Turkey with aid. Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said as many as a million refugees could arrive if the Russian-Syrian campaign continues. Fifty thousand people had reached Turkey’s borders in the latest wave and Ankara was admitting people in a “controlled fashion”, he said.
