Despair grows among civilians trapped in Aleppo

Aleppo — Desperation mounted Sunday among thousands of hunger-stricken Syrian civilians trapped in the rebel enclave in Aleppo after their evacuation was delayed by a disagreement over the fate of other besieged areas. As international alarm grew over the plight of residents including women, children, the sick and wounded, the UN Security Council was to vote on whether to send observers to the battleground city. An AFP correspondent who visited a hospital in the rebel sector saw appalling conditions with patients lying on the floor without food or water and almost no heating despite sub-zero temperatures at night. Thousands of civilians and rebels had begun leaving Aleppo on Thursday under an evacuation deal allowing Syria’s regime to take full control of the divided city after years of fighting. Families have been sheltering during the night in freezing temperatures in bombed out apartment blocks in Aleppo’s Al-Amiriyah district, the departure point for evacuations before they were halted. Abu Omar said that after waiting outside in the cold for nine hours the previous day, he had returned on Saturday only to be told the buses were not coming. “There’s no more food or drinking water, and the situation is getting worse by the day,” he said, adding that his four children were sick because of the cold. Dozens of trucks with humanitarian aid crossed the Turkish border Saturday into Syria, piling supplies in a buffer zone. Aleppo has seen some of the worst violence of the nearly six-year war that has killed more than 310,000 people. UN envoy Staffan de Mistura estimated that as of Thursday around 40,000 civilians and perhaps as many as 5,000 opposition fighters remained in Aleppo’s rebel enclave. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) appealed for safe passage for the civilians still trapped in the city. “People have suffered a lot. Please come to an agreement and help save thousands of lives,” said ICRC Syria delegation head Marianne Gasser. “We cannot abandon these people.”