Weeks of aerial bombings by Bashar al Assad regime and Russian forces and rebel counterattacks have heaped further misery on besieged Syrian civilians in Aleppo, who have refused to leave the shattered city during a three-day ceasefire.
Over the weekend, fighting broke out, exposing families trapped with children and elderly to more attacks.
Hundreds of people have been killed in the offensive launched by Russia and the Syrian regime to wrest control of the parts of city held by rebels fighting Damascus since 2012.
Moscow and Bashar al Assad say they are targeting ISIS militants but their indiscriminate bombings of civilians and heartbreaking images of dead children contradict their claims and lay bare the brutality of their campaign
The United Nations has termed the bombardment and crippling siege of Syria’s war-ravaged eastern Aleppo as “crimes of historic proportions.”
“The ancient city of Aleppo, a place of millennial civility and beauty, is today a slaughterhouse – a gruesome locus of pain and fear, where the lifeless bodies of small children are trapped under streets of rubble and pregnant women deliberately bombed,” the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein told a special session of the Geneva-based Human Rights Council.
He asked members of the UN Human Rights Council to “speak with one voice” in an effort to end the bloodshed, as the 47-member body prepared to take up a draft resolution on the issue.
“The collective failure of the international community to protect civilians and halt this bloodshed should haunt every one of us,” he noted further, and warned that “its costs will be borne by our children, and future generations.”
The UN human rights chief further said the “civil war – now also a proxy conflict fuelled by cynical regional and international interests” – has killed well over 300,000, wounded and traumatized countless others, resulting in abduction, summary execution or arbitrary detention of tens of thousands and displaced more half the Syrian population.
Hospitals, schools, marketplaces, water facilities and neighbourhood bakeries had been deliberately and repeatedly attacked and millions have been denied life-saving aid, he said.
