Residents of rebel-held east Aleppo have described scenes of devastation after one of the heaviest and most sustained nights of bombardment the city has experienced. Activists said that Syrian and Russian warplanes attacked the city hours after the announcement of a major new offensive dashed any hopes of restoring a US-Russian ceasefire.
At least 91 deaths were recorded in the province on Friday, but activists said the figure was probably an underestimate because many bodies remained buried in rubble.
One attack, on a town west of Aleppo city called Bashqateen, killed 15 members of a family who had been sheltering in a residential building housing internally displaced people, activists said.
As the bombing entered a second day, three medical facilities and two centres belonging to the White Helmets, a volunteer rescue group, were hit in airstrikes that disabled some of their vehicles, cut off roads in the city and left victims trapped in collapsed buildings. The White Helmets said more than 40 buildings were destroyed.
Activists posted images of huge craters that they alleged were the first instances of warplanes dropping bunker buster bombs – a claim the Guardian could not independently verify.
“Are we in the era of technology and civilisation?” said a resident of eastern Aleppo. “Is this Russian civilisation and democracy? The killing of children, women and elderly people?”
The Syrian military announced its new offensive late on Thursday as the US secretary of state, John Kerry, met his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, and other foreign ministers on the margins of a UN summit in New York, with the ostensible hope of restoring a week-long truce that collapsed on Monday.
Kerry and Lavrov met again on Friday, but they appeared to have made little progress towards a ceasefire. “I met with the foreign minister, we exchanged some ideas and we had a little bit of progress,” Kerry said. Earlier, when asked by reporters whether the truce could be reinstated, Lavrov said: “You should ask the Americans.”
Aleppo, once Syria’s commercial capital, is divided into a western portion controlled by the government and an eastern area held by rebels. The eastern part has been besieged for two months, with an estimated 250,000 people in dire need of humanitarian aid.
In a stark illustration of the challenges facing rescuers on the ground, dramatic footage emerged of a girl being pulled from the ruins of a building and rushed away for treatment. Five-year-old Rawan Alowsh could be heard wailing on the footage, broadcast by Sky News from the Bab al-Nairab district of Aleppo.
Rawan was shown later on Friday recovering in hospital. Neither her parents nor her four siblings were reported to have survived the attack.
Medics in eastern Aleppo spoke of their despair at international efforts to alleviate their suffering and anger at the continued assault on the population. Bara’a, a nurse at a hospital that doctors in Aleppo refer to with the codename M2 to conceal its location, said she had witnessed several children brought in with severe injuries on Friday.
“It is so saddening,” she said. “The strikes and massacres do not stop. Bombings, siege, homelessness, exhaustion, fear, manpower shortage. The silence of the world is killing us.“Anger has filled everyone who remains in this city of rubble. Many of the wounded are children and, when you look in their eyes, they weep and say we have nothing left. Curse this justice. They lose their limbs and become disabled for life and their only sin is that they are the children of Syria.
“They have burned their childhood and their innocence and made them homeless in their country and all we get in return are words and promises from outside. God curse humanity if this is what it has become.”
Activists claimed the government and its Russian allies had deployed phosphorus and cluster munitions as well as barrel and vacuum bombs. It was unclear if government forces were planning an imminent ground incursion into the rebel-held districts, but some observers interpreted the intense shelling as a sign that such an effort would follow in due course.
Scouts on the city’s eastern outskirts reported that pro-government positions, which are dominated by Iraqi militias, were making plans to advance in large numbers.
Abu Yousef, a former teacher from the Bustan al-Qasr district of east Aleppo, said: “For many months now, the Shia militias have gathered near the airport. They are Iraqis mainly and they came here in big numbers in July. There are several thousand of them and they are very sectarian.
“They do the fighting, the Iranians give the orders and the Syrians army follows. All the eastern approaches to the city have been destroyed. And the bombing today was crazy. Rubble is bouncing around. They are dropping every type of bomb they have. They are getting ready to invade.”
A Syrian military source told Agence France-Presse that the timing of the ground operation would “depend on the results of the strikes and the situation on the ground”.
Activists said the government of Bashar al-Assad also bombed one of two water distribution plants in the opening move of what the military command described as an operation to reclaim the opposition-controlled eastern districts of the city. “We need a miracle to save us from inevitable death,” said a doctor in the city.
One western diplomat said he did not believe that the rebel-held districts were in immediate danger of a ground incursion. Speaking on condition of anonymity, they said that at the meeting in New York on Thursday, Lavrov had denied there was any offensive planned to retake Aleppo.
“It seems highly improbable that there would be a quick defeat of eastern Aleppo,” the source said. “The only way to take it is with such a monstrous atrocity that it would be remembered for decades or generations. To take it quickly, much of Aleppo would be destroyed.”
