Syria: Russia wants opposition to withdraw from Aleppo

Russia said today that it was ready for talks with the United States about the withdrawal of all Syrian opposition factions from eastern Aleppo where advances by the Russia and Iran-backed Syrian army and its Shia militia allies threaten to deal a crushing blow to the revolution.

An official with an Aleppo rebel group accused Russia of backtracking on ideas agreed at talks in Turkey that would have led to a ceasefire, and said opposition commanders had vowed to fight on even as they face intense bombardment and ground assaults.

Russia has acknowledged contacts with the Syrian factions opposed to the continued rule of Syrian despot Bashar Al-Assad but given no details of the talks in Turkey.

“We are immediately ready to send out military experts, diplomats to Geneva in order to agree mutual actions with our American colleagues to ensure the pull-out of all the rebels without exclusion from eastern Aleppo,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said.

Russia, which has assumed a pivotal role in Syria since it deployed its air force there 15 months ago, said the withdrawal of all “rebels” would “normalize life” in eastern Aleppo.

“I asked the factions, they said ‘we will not surrender’,” said Zakaria Malahifji, the head of the political office of the Aleppo-based Fastaqim faction, speaking from Turkey.

But with the revolutionaries under fierce assault in their shrinking enclave, the UN envoy for Syria suggested eastern Aleppo could fall to the government by the end of the year and hoped a “formula” could be found to avoid a “terrible battle”.

Assad regime advances in Aleppo have brought Al-Assad to the brink of his biggest victory yet in the war that grew out of protests against his rule in 2011.

Backed by the Russian air force and Iran-controlled Shia militias from Iran, Iraq, Lebanon and even southeast Asia, the regime has gradually closed in on eastern Aleppo this year. The latest phase of the attack has driven the opposition from about half the territory they held.

The United Nations estimates that close to 30,000 people have been displaced by the latest fighting, 18,000 of them leaving to government-held areas and a further 8,500 going to the Kurdish-controlled neighbourhood of Sheikh Maqsoud.

Tens of thousands of people are thought to be sheltering in the opposition-held east, where supplies of food and fuel are critically low and hospitals have been repeatedly bombed out of operation, recognise as war crimes by Human Rights Watch and others.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based group that reports on the war, said up to 200,000 people may still be in the rebel-held area. UN envoy Staffan de Mistura said it could be more than 100,000 people.

Armed opposition factions in Aleppo recently decided to dissolve their individual formations and to reform as the “Army of Aleppo” in an attempt to unify all their resources to be able to push back against the Assad regime onslaught.