UN security council to meet on Syria as battle rages near Aleppo

The United Nations Security Council is due to meet on Sunday to discuss the recent escalation of fighting in Aleppo in Syria which has left dozens dead and nearly two people without water.

The meeting, which will be public, was requested by the United States, Britain and France, diplomats said. 

The siege on the Syrian city intensified after the end of the weeklong ceasefire as a barrage of bombs have been dropped on the city since Thursday. Syrian government and rebel forces battled for control of high ground on the Aleppo outskirts on Saturday as warplanes bombed the city's opposition-held east relentlessly in a Russian-backed offensive that has left Washington's Syria policy in tatters.

The attack has left US policy on Syria in disarray, with diplomats pursuing a halt in hostilities even as Assad’s forces on the ground ramped up fighting using Moscow’s air power as back-up.

The intensity of the attack and the power of some of the larger bombs are unprecedented even for a city that has endured some of the most brutal fighting of Syria’s long civil war, including years of notoriously imprecise barrel bombs.

In their first major ground advance of the offensive, the army and its militia allies seized control of the Handarat Palestinian refugee camp, a few kilometres north of Aleppo, only for rebels to counterattack a few hours later.

That route fell to government troops in July, cutting off an estimated 250,000 people, and the latest advances consolidate the siege. “Handarat has fallen,” an official with one of the main Aleppo rebel groups told Reuters.

The scale and nature of the attacks have left Aleppo reeling and dozens dead. Activist groups said more than 50 bodies had been found since midnight on Friday alone. One warned that “people now don’t think they will live to see another day”.

Two weeks after Moscow and Washington announced a ceasefire, President Bashar al-Assad and his Russian and Iranian allies appear to have launched a campaign for a decisive battlefield victory that has buried any hope for diplomacy.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, who hammered out the truce over the course of months of intensive diplomacy, was left pleading in vain this week with Russia to halt air strikes.

Rebel officials said air strikes on Saturday hit at least four areas of the opposition-held east, and they believe the strikes are mostly being carried out by Russian warplanes. Video of the blast sites shows huge craters several meters wide and deep.

"There are planes in the sky now," Ammar al Selmo, the head of the Civil Defence rescue service in the opposition-held east, told Reuters from Aleppo.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said at least 45 people, among them 10 children, were killed in eastern Aleppo on Saturday. Selmo put the two-day death toll at more than 200.

The army says it is targeting only militants.

“Depriving children of water puts them at risk of catastrophic outbreaks of waterborne diseases and adds to the suffering, fear and horror that children in Aleppo live through every day,” Hanaa Singer, the representative of the children’s agency, Unicef in Syria, said. “It is critical for children’s survival that all parties in the conflict stop attacks on water infrastructure.”