Warplanes knock out Aleppo hospital

Russian or Syrian regime warplanes knocked a major Aleppo hospital out of service yesterday, hospital workers said, and ground forces intensified an assault on the city’s besieged rebel sector, in a battle that has become a potentially decisive turning point in the civil war.
Shelling damaged at least another hospital and a bakery, killing six residents queuing up for bread under a siege that has trapped 250,000 people with food running out.
The World Health Organisation said it had reports that both hospitals were now out of service.
The week-old assault has already killed hundreds of people, with bunker-busting bombs bringing down buildings on residents huddled inside.
Only about 30 doctors are believed to be left inside the besieged zone, coping with hundreds of wounded a day.
“The warplane flew over us and directly started dropping its missiles...at around 4am,” Mohamed Abu Rajab, a radiologist at the M10 hospital, the largest trauma hospital in the city’s rebel-held sector, said. “Rubble fell in on the patients in the intensive care unit.”
M10 hospital workers said oxygen and power generators were destroyed and patients were transferred to another hospital. There were no initial reports of casualties in the hospital.
Photographs sent to Reuters by a hospital worker at the facility showed damaged storage tanks, a rubble strewn area, and the collapsed roof of what he said was a power facility.
The regime of President Bashar al-Assad, backed by Russian air power, Iranian ground forces and Shia militia fighters from Iran, Iraq and Lebanon, has launched a massive assault to crush the rebels’ last major urban stronghold.
Syria’s largest city before the war, Aleppo has been divided for years between government and rebel zones.
The offensive began with unprecedentedly fierce bombing last week, followed by a ground campaign this week, burying a ceasefire that had been the culmination of months of diplomacy between Washington and Moscow.
Washington says Moscow and Damascus are guilty of war crimes for targeting civilians, hospitals, rescue workers and aid deliveries, to break the will of residents and force them to surrender.
Syria and Russia say they target only militants.
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon also said those using “ever more destructive weapons” were committing war crimes and that the situation in Aleppo was worse than “a slaughterhouse”.
The Syrian army said a Nusra Front position had been destroyed in Aleppo’s old quarter, and other militant-held areas targeted in “concentrated air strikes” near the city.
France’s Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault said he was working to put forward a United Nations Security Council resolution to impose a ceasefire in Aleppo, and that any country that opposed it would be deemed complicit in war crimes.
“This resolution will leave everyone facing their responsibilities: those who don’t vote it, risk being held responsible for complicity in war crimes,” he said.
Another hospital, M2, was damaged by bombardment in the al-Maadi district, where at least six people were killed while queuing for bread at a nearby bakery, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring body and residents.
Food supplies are scarce in the besieged area, and those trapped inside often queue up before dawn for food.
The collapse of the peace process leaves US policy on Syria in tatters and is a personal blow to Secretary of State John Kerry, who led talks with Moscow despite scepticism from other top officials in President Barack Obama’s administration.
Washington says the offensive shows Assad and Russian President Vladimir Putin have abandoned negotiations in order to seek battlefield victory, turning their backs on an earlier international consensus that no side could win by force.
Assad’s Iranian and Lebanese Hezbollah allies have said in recent days the war will be won in combat.
But the rebels remain a potent military force even as they have lost control of urban areas.
The collapse of peace efforts ends a proposed scheme to separate Western-backed fighters from hardened militants.
It has also raised the question of whether the rebels’ foreign backers will increase military backing to rebels who have long said weapons they provide are inadequate.
The rebels’ main demand has long been for the provision of anti-aircraft missiles, but Washington has resisted this, fearing perhaps that they could end up in the hands of militants.
A rebel commander, in the meanwhile, has told Reuters his group had received deliveries of a new type of Grad surface-to-surface rockets.
The rockets, with a range of 22km-40km, had arrived in “excellent quantities” and will be used on battlefronts in Aleppo, Hama and the coastal region, Colonel Fares al-Bayoush said.
Fierce fighting accompanied by air strikes was reported yesterday in northern Hama province between rebels, the regime and allied forces.
A senior official in Aleppo-based rebel group said pro-regime government forces were mobilising in apparent preparation for more ground attacks in central areas of the city.
“There have been clashes in al-Suweiqa from 5am until now. The army advanced a little bit, and the guys are now repelling it,” a fighter in the rebel Levant Front group said in a recording sent to Reuters, referring to an area in the city centre where there was also fighting on Tuesday.
Another rebel official said government forces were also attacking the insurgent-held Handarat refugee camp a few kilometres to the north of Aleppo.
“It doesn’t seem that their operation in the old city is the primary operation, it seems like a diversionary one so that the regime consumes the people on that front and advances in the camp,” the official, Zakaria Malahifij, head of the political office of the Fastaqim group, told Reuters from Turkey.

Turkey to complete Syria border wall within five months
A concrete wall being built to stop illegal crossings along the length of Turkey’s 900km border with Syria will be finished by the end of February, an official at a Turkish state institution with knowledge of the project said yesterday.
Nato allies have been urging Ankara to seal off the border with Islamic State-controlled territory in Syria and is also concerned by the presence of the Syrian Kurdish YPG militia, which controls most of its Syrian border.
Construction on a border wall to combat smuggling and illegal migration started as early as 2014 even as Turkey maintained an open-border policy that has seen nearly 3mn Syrians seek refuge in the country.
“Construction will be completed within five months,” the official said, declining to be identified because he was not authorised to speak to the media.
He said winter conditions would be a challenge to the timetable, however. Turkey last month launched an operation dubbed “Euphrates Shield” in alliance with Syrian rebels to drive Islamic State militants away from the border area and stop the YPG’s advance.
Turkey regards the YPG as closely tied to Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) militants fighting an insurgency in southeast Turkey and deems both as terrorist organisations.
A 200km stretch of the wall has already been completed and state housing developer TOKI will build the rest, the official said.
He likened the project to border walls in other countries, such as the one between parts of Mexico and the US.
The official declined to give an estimate for the cost of construction.
But the mass circulation Hurriyet newspaper said that including a road for military patrols planned alongside it, the wall was expected to cost 2bn lira ($672mn).
Made up of seven-tonne portable blocks topped with razor wire, the wall will be 10 feet high and 6.5 feet wide.
The official said private companies would be hired once construction tenders were completed.
Hurriyet cited the head of TOKI as saying that 200-250 concrete blocks were currently being produced daily at five work sites, and that the latest construction work had begun around 20 days ago.
New watchtowers on roads patrolled by armoured vehicles have already been erected along the border this year as part of increased security measures.