Tag Archives: Syria

U.S. looks to shore up allies’ support to battle Islamic State

BRUSSELS (Reuters) – The United States said on Tuesday it hoped allies demonstrate a willingness to ramp up their contributions to the fight against Islamic State and to deterring Russia in eastern Europe during high-level defense talks in Brussels this week.

Defense Secretary Ash Carter said he plans to outline America’s plan to accelerate the campaign against Islamic State to defense chiefs from more than two dozen allies at talks on Thursday.

The United States has long-standing concerns that many allies are not contributing nearly enough to combat the jihadist group that has spread beyond its self-declared caliphate in parts of Iraq and Syria.

“I don’t think anybody’s satisfied with the pace of the (campaign), that’s why we’re all looking to accelerate it. Certainly the president isn’t (satisfied),” Carter told reporters traveling with him.

Washington has signaled the need for military and police trainers as well as contributions of special operations forces, including from Sunni Muslim Arab allies now expressing a new willingness to contribute.

“We have a very clear operational picture of how to do it. Now we just need the resources and the forces to fall in behind it,” he said, noting plans to capture Islamic State strongholds of Mosul in Iraq and Raqqa in Syria.

A top U.S. intelligence official told Congress on Tuesday that an Iraqi-led operation to retake Mosul is unlikely to take place this year.

The U.S. strategy in Syria is likely to come under intense scrutiny after four months of Russian air strikes have tipped momentum toward President Bashar al-Assad in Syria’s five-year-old civil war.

Defense chiefs were expected to discuss a major Syrian government offensive backed by Russia and Iran now underway near Aleppo that rebels say threatens the future of their insurrection.

DETERRING RUSSIA

On Wednesday, NATO defense ministers will begin outlining plans for a complex web of small eastern outposts, forces on rotation, regular war games and warehoused equipment ready for a rapid response force.

U.S. plans for a four-fold increase in military spending in Europe to $3.4 billion in fiscal year 2017 are central to the strategy, which has been shaped in response to Russia’s annexation of Crimea from Ukraine in 2014.

“I’ll be looking for others in NATO to echo (us) in our investment,” Carter said.

Carter said the plan aimed to move NATO to a “full deterrence posture” to thwart any kind of aggression.

“It’s not going to look like it did back in Cold War days but it will constitute, in today’s terms, a strong deterrent,” Carter said.

(Reporting by Phil Stewart; Editing by Alistair Bell)

U.N. fears for hundreds of thousands if Syria troops encircle Aleppo

GENEVA/DAMASCUS/ONCUPINAR, Turkey (Reuters) – Hundreds of thousands of civilians could be cut off from food if Syrian government forces encircle rebel-held parts of Aleppo, the United Nations said on Tuesday, warning of a new exodus of refugees fleeing a Russian-backed assault.

The army aims to secure the border with Turkey and recover control of Aleppo, a senior adviser to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad told Reuters, adding that she did not expect diplomacy to succeed while foreign states maintain support for insurgents.

Syrian government forces, backed by Russian air strikes and Iranian and Lebanese Hezbollah fighters, have launched a major offensive in the countryside around Aleppo, which has been divided between government and rebel control for years.

It marks one of the most important shifts of momentum in the five-year civil war that has killed 250,000 people and already driven 11 million from their homes.

Since last week, fighting has already wrecked the first attempt at peace talks for two years and led rebel fighters to speak about losing their northern power base altogether.

The U.N. is worried the government advance could cut off the last link for civilians in rebel-held parts of Aleppo with the main Turkish border crossing, which has long served as the lifeline for insurgent-controlled territory.

“It would leave up to 300,000 people, still residing in the city, cut off from humanitarian aid unless cross-line access could be negotiated,” the United Nations Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said.

If government advances around the city continue, it said, “local councils in the city estimate that some 100,000 – 150,000 civilians may flee”. Aleppo was once Syria’s biggest city, home to 2 million people.

Air strikes continued on Tal Rifaat, Anadan and other towns in the Aleppo countryside, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which monitors the war, and activists said, adding that they were almost certainly from Russian planes.

Independent Doctors’ Association official Mahmoud Mustafa said at least two people had been killed and 30 wounded in air strikes near Tal Rifaat and villages near Azaz. The death toll could be higher since his figures referred only to victims brought to the organization’s hospital on the Syrian side of the Oncupinar border crossing with Turkey.

In a residential area of Damascus, a suicide bomber drove his car into a police officers’ club on Tuesday, blowing himself up, a Syrian interior ministry statement said. The state news agency SANA reported three dead and 14 wounded.

The Observatory said eight police officers had been killed and 20 wounded in the blast. Islamic State claimed responsibility.

While mortar and missile attacks have been a common feature of life in Damascus, this was the first bombing of its kind in many months in the center of the capital.

Last month, at least 60 people were killed, including 25 Shi’ite fighters, on the outskirts of the city by a car bomb and two suicide bombers near Syria’s holiest Shi’ite shrine, the Observatory reported. Islamic State also claimed that attack.

“BETWEEN TWO EVILS”

Turkey, already home to 2.5 million Syrians, the world’s biggest refugee population, has so far kept its frontier mostly closed to the latest wave of displaced.

Trucks ferrying aid and building supplies were crossing the border at Oncupinar into Syria on Tuesday, while a few ambulances entered Turkey, sirens blazing.

But the crossing remained closed to the tens of thousands of refugees sheltering in camps on the Syrian side of the border.

“We Syrians will be stuck between two evils if Turkey does not open the doors,” said Khaled, 30, trying to return to Aleppo to rescue his wife and children. “We will have to choose between Russian bombardment or Daesh,” he said, using a pejorative Arabic acronym for Islamic State.

The U.N. urged Ankara on Tuesday to open the border and has called on other countries to assist Turkey with aid.

Assad adviser Bouthaina Shaaban, speaking at her office in Damascus, said the government’s aim was also “to control our borders with Turkey because Turkey is the main source of terrorists, and the main crossing for them”. The Syrian government describes all the groups fighting it as terrorists.

Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said as many as a million refugees could arrive if the Russian-Syrian campaign continues. Fifty thousand people had reached Turkey’s borders in the latest wave and Ankara was admitting people in a “controlled fashion”, he said.

The U.N. World Food Programme said in a statement it had begun food distribution in the Syrian town of Azaz near the Turkish border for the new wave of displaced people.

“The situation is quite volatile and fluid in northern Aleppo with families on the move seeking safety,” said Jakob Kern, WFP’s country director in Syria.

“We are extremely concerned as access and supply routes from the north to eastern Aleppo city and surrounding areas are now cut off, but we are making every effort to get enough food in place for all those in need, bringing it in through the remaining open border crossing point from Turkey.”

LITTLE HOPE FOR PEACE TALKS

The Russian-backed government assault around Aleppo, as well as advances further south, helped torpedo the first peace talks for nearly two years.

International powers are due to meet on Thursday in Munich in a bid to resurrect the talks, but diplomats hold out virtually no hope for negotiations as long as the offensive continues. Rebels say they will not attend without a halt to the bombing.

Moscow turned the momentum in the war in favor of its ally Assad when it joined the conflict four months ago with a campaign of air strikes against his enemies, many of whom are supported by Arab states, Turkey and the West.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry urged Russia on Tuesday to join efforts to bring about a ceasefire. “Russia’s activities from Aleppo and in the region are making it much more difficult to be able to come to the table and be able to have a serious conversation,” Kerry told reporters.

The Syrian president’s adviser said talk of a ceasefire was coming from states that “do not want an end to terrorism” and were instead seeking to shore up insurgents, who are losing territory on a number of important frontlines.

(Additional reporting by Suleiman al-Khalidi in Beirut, Tom Miles in Geneva, Gergely Szakacs and Marton Dunai in Budapest and Maria Tsvetkova in Moscow; writing by Peter Graff; editing by Giles Elgood, Philippa Fletcher and David Stamp)

Mass deaths in Syrian jails amount to crime of ‘extermination’, U.N. says

GENEVA (Reuters) – Detainees held by the Syrian government are being killed on a massive scale amounting to a state policy of “extermination” of the civilian population, a crime against humanity, United Nations investigators said on Monday.

The U.N. commission of inquiry called on the Security Council to impose “targeted sanctions” on high-ranking Syrian civilian and military officials responsible for or complicit in deaths, torture and disappearances in custody, but stopped short of naming the suspects.

The independent experts said they had also documented mass executions and torture of prisoners by two jihadi groups, the Nusra Front and Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL. These constituted war crimes and in the case of Islamic State also crimes against humanity, it said.

The report, “Out of Sight, Out of Mind: Deaths in Detention”, covers March 10, 2011 to November 30, 2015. It is based on interviews with 621 survivors and witnesses and evidence gathered by the team led by chairman Paulo Pinheiro.

“Over the past four and a half years, thousands of detainees have been killed while in the custody of warring parties,” the Commission of Inquiry on Syria said.

The U.N. criticism of the Damascus government comes at a time when its forces have been advancing with the aid of Russian air strikes. A Moscow-backed government assault near the city of Aleppo this month marks one of the biggest momentum shifts in the five year war and helped torpedo peace talks last week.

Pinheiro, noting that the victims were mostly civilian men, told a news briefing: “Never in these five years these facilities that are described in our report have been visited and we have repeatedly asked the government to do so.”

There was no immediate response by the government of President Bashar al-Assad, which has rejected previous reports.

“Prison officials, their superiors throughout the hierarchy, high-ranking officials in military hospitals and the military police corps as well as government were aware that deaths on a massive scale were occurring,” Pinheiro said.

“Thus we concluded there were ‘reasonable grounds’ – that is (the threshold) that we apply – to believe that the conduct described amounts to extermination as a crime against humanity.”

NAMES KEPT IN U.N. SAFE

Tens of thousands of detainees are held by the government atany one time, and thousands more have “disappeared” after arrest by state forces or gone missing after abduction by armed groups, the report said.

Through mass arrests and killing of civilians, including by starvation and denial of medical treatment, state forces have “engaged in the multiple commissions of crimes, amounting to a systematic and widespread attack against a civilian population”.

There were reasonable grounds to believe that “high-ranking officers”, including the heads of branches and directorates commanding the detention facilities and military police, as well as their civilian superiors, knew of the deaths and of bodies buried anonymously in mass graves.

They are thus “individually criminally liable”, the investigators said, calling again for Syria to be referred to the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), a decision that only the Security Council can take.

“It depends on the political will of states. Apparently for Syria now, there is none – there is total impunity, unfortunately,” said panel member Carla del Ponte.

“We are still waiting for a green light for international justice,” she said.

“The Security Council doesn’t do anything and can’t do anything because of the veto”, she added, a reference to Russia, Assad’s ally, which has repeatedly used its power as a permanent Council member to block resolutions against Damascus.

Over the past four years, the investigators have drawn up a confidential list of suspected war criminals and units from all sides which is kept in a U.N. safe in Geneva. Pinheiro said “we have included new names” but gave no details.

Del Ponte disclosed that the U.N. investigators have provided judicial assistance to various authorities in response to 15 requests for information on foreign fighters in Syria.

She declined to identify the countries involved, but later told Reuters: “These are low-level and middle-level perpetrators because they are foreign fighters, not high-ranking.”

The Nusra Front, which is allied to al Qaeda, and Islamic State, which has proclaimed a “caliphate” in swathes of Syria and Iraq, have committed mass executions of captured government soldiers and subjected civilians to “illicit trials” by Sharia courts which ordered death sentences, the report said.

“Due to their exclusive control of large territories and its centralized command and control structure the so-called ISIS established detention facilities as far as we know are in Raqqa, Deir al-Zor and Aleppo. Serious violations were documented in these facilities, including torture and mass executions,” Pinheiro said.

“Accountability for these and other crimes must form part of any political solution,” the investigators said, five days after U.N.-sponsored peace talks were suspended without any result.

DEAD BODIES

Raneem Matouq, daughter of prominent lawyer Khalil Matouq missing since Oct 2012, said she had been held for two months in 2014 at Military Security Damascus Branch 227 after being arrested for her own “peaceful activism” while a student.

Inmates at the detention facility, estimated to hold several thousand, have died as a result of torture, disease and appalling prison conditions, including chronic lack of food, according to the U.N. report.

“I was with 10 other girls in a room one-and-a-half metres long by two meters long. For guys it was a room the same scale but they had 30-40 men, with dead bodies,” Matouq told Reuters on a visit to Geneva last week with Amnesty International.

“It was full of insects, we were sleeping on the floor, there was no toilet,” she said. “We were allowed to go to the toilet three times a day, we called it ‘the picnic’ because we could walk outside.

“Sometimes we would find dead bodies inside the toilet (area). It was so horrible, they were all men.”

(Reporting by Stephanie Nebehay; editing by Ralph Boulton and Peter Graff)

Faced with new influx, Turkey’s open door for migrants may be closing

ONCUPINAR, Turkey (Reuters) – As the number of Syrian refugees now amassing on the Turkish border swells into the tens of thousands, Ankara’s long-standing open door to migrants may be closing.

An assault by Russian-backed Syrian government forces around the city of Aleppo has sent more than 30,000 people fleeing to the Turkish border gate of Oncupinar in the past few days, and officials say tens of thousands more could be on the move.

The surge has created a bitter irony for Turkey.

Praised on the one hand for taking in more than 2.5 million refugees from Syria’s five-year war, it is also under pressure to stop their perilous onward journeys to Europe, and to prevent radical militants from sneaking over what was long a porous border to carry out attacks in Turkey or abroad.

Yet as it tries to keep the gates shut at Oncupinar and provide aid across the border instead, it now finds itself facing calls to let people in.

“We have much wider considerations now … There are terrorist organizations that weren’t there when the Syrian conflict first began,” a senior government official who deals with immigration issues said, explaining how the situation on the border had changed in recent years.

A growing number of refugees just wanted to use Turkey as a staging post to Europe despite the dangers, he said, leaving Ankara with a responsibility to stop incidents like the drowning of a Syrian toddler last September as his family tried to reach the Greek islands, an image which stirred worldwide sympathy.

“Let everyone in and you may see another Aylan Kurdi.”

Turkish aid groups are delivering food and supplies to tent villages on the Syrian side of the border at Oncupinar and the local authorities say there is no need, for now, to open the gates. President Tayyip Erdogan has said that, if necessary, the refugees will ultimately be allowed in.

Ankara has long argued that the only sustainable way to manage the migrant flow is to establish a “safe zone” inside Syria, an internationally protected area where displaced civilians can be given refuge without crossing into Turkey.

The idea has gained little traction with Western leaders, who see battling Islamic State in Syria as the main priority and fear protecting such a zone would put them in direct military confrontation with President Bashar al-Assad’s forces.

But on a small scale, Turkey is putting it into practice at Oncupinar.

A wounded teenager and his father were let through by foot early on Monday, while a trickle of ambulances ferried the badly injured to hospitals in nearby Turkish towns. But for the majority, the border is firmly closed.

“Unless their lives are in danger, unless there’s an imminent risk, the arrangements on the Syrian side have the capacity to accommodate them,” the government official said.

WAITING TO ENTER TURKEY

In the camps at Bab al-Salama on the Syrian side, where children play in muddy lanes between rows of tents lashed by rain, some are starting to wonder whether they are still welcome in a country they once saw as a guaranteed safe haven.

“I have been here for the past month. I am waiting for Turkey to open the door,” said Dilel Cumali, a woman who fled from Dera’a in Syria’s southwest near the Jordanian border.

“There are no beds, no food, nothing to wear. We had to sleep where it’s wet and there’s nothing to cover ourselves with. There is nothing to feed the kids. We don’t want anything. All we want is to get inside Turkey.”

Under a November deal with the European Union, Turkey agreed to do more to integrate its refugee population – now the world’s largest – and try to lower the number of asylum seekers arriving in Europe after over a million streamed onto the continent in 2015, many by sea from Turkey.

At least 22 migrants drowned after their boat capsized in the Aegean sea off the Turkish coast on Monday, suggesting the exodus shows no sign of abating.

Asked on Saturday about the migrants at Oncupinar, EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini said Turkey had a moral and legal duty to protect refugees, adding EU support to Ankara was aimed at guaranteeing it could cope with them.

FRUSTRATION

Turkey, a NATO member with a 560-mile border with Syria, is increasingly frustrated at the international failure to do more to stop the bombing by President Bashar al-Assad’s forces and his allies including Russia, which it sees as the root cause of the migrant flows.

“Those who can’t say stop the bombardment are saying stop the immigration wave. If you’re serious, stop the authors of that cruelty,” said Deputy Prime Minister Yalcin Akdogan, a long-standing Erdogan advisor.

A suicide bombing in Istanbul last month which killed 10 German tourists, carried out by a Saudi-born Syrian who entered Turkey as a refugee, served only to highlight the risks.

Around Oncupinar, eight camps were set up on the Syrian side for some 60,000 people even before the latest influx, according to Oncupinar governor Suleyman Tapsiz. A ninth is being built.

“There is a perception that Turkey has shut its doors and is not doing anything. On the contrary, there are major efforts to accommodate these people on the Syrian side,” a second Turkish government official said.

“It’s not like we’re shutting our doors in their face.”

A flag of the opposition Free Syrian Army fluttered over the road that leads out from a camp at Bab al-Salama to the Syrian city of Azaz, one of the last towns between the Syrian army’s advance and the Turkish border. Opposition fighters holding Kalashnikovs milled around nearby.

“I fled Assad’s and Russia’s bombardment. Please tell them to open the doors so we can move to safety. We have no safety here,” said Sabah al-Muhammed, an elderly woman who said she had walked for 10 hours to reach the border.

Even amid the chaos of Syria’s war, the message that Europe’s borders were closed had reached her.

“I swear to god, we don’t want to go to Europe, we don’t want Europe. We are Muslim people and we want to live in a Muslim country,” she said.

(Writing by Nick Tattersall; Editing by David Dolan and Philippa Fletcher)

Russian firepower helps Syrian forces edge toward Turkey border

BEIRUT/ONCUPINAR, Turkey (Reuters) – The Syrian army advanced toward the Turkish border on Monday in a major offensive backed by Russia and Iran that rebels say now threatens the future of their nearly five-year-old insurrection against President Bashar al-Assad.

Iranian backed-militias played a key role on the ground as Russian jets intensified what rebels call a scorched earth policy that has allowed the military back into the strategic northern area for the first time in more than two years.

“Our whole existence is now threatened, not just losing more ground,” said Abdul Rahim al-Najdawi from Liwa al-Tawheed, an insurgent group. “They are advancing and we are pulling back because in the face of such heavy aerial bombing we must minimize our losses.”

The Russian-backed Syrian government advance over recent days amounts to one of the biggest shifts in momentum of the war, helping to torpedo the first peace talks for two years, which collapsed last week before they had begun in earnest.

The Syrian military and its allies were almost three miles from the rebel-held town of Tal Rafaat, which has brought them to around 16 miles from the Turkish border, the rebels, residents and a conflict monitor said.

The assault around the city of Aleppo in northern Syria has prompted tens of thousands to flee toward Turkey, already sheltering more than 2.5 million Syrians.

In the last two days escalating Russian bombardment of towns northwest of Aleppo, Anadan and Haritan, brought several thousand more, according to a resident in the town of Azaz.

Aleppo, Syria’s largest city before the war with 2 million people, has been divided for years into rebel and government-held sections. The government wants to take full control, which would be its biggest prize yet in a war that has already killed at least 250,000 people and driven 11 million from their homes.

Rebel-held areas in and around Aleppo are still home to 350,000 people, and aid workers have said they could soon fall to the government.

Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan was quoted at the weekend as saying Turkey was under threat, and Ankara has so far kept the border crossing there closed to most refugees.

There are now around 77,000 refugees taking shelter in camps on the Syrian side of the Turkish border, Turkish Deputy Prime Minister Numan Kurtulmus said on Monday. He said that a worst-case scenario could see as many as 600,000 at Turkey’s border.

After around a week of heavy Russian air strikes, Syrian government troops and their allies broke through rebel defenses to reach two Shi’ite towns in northern Aleppo province on Wednesday, choking opposition supply lines from Turkey.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel said she was “appalled” by the suffering of Aleppo, blaming primarily Russian bombing and suggesting it violated a U.N. Security Council resolution Moscow signed in December.

Kerem Kinik, Vice President of the Turkish Red Crescent, told reporters at the Oncupinar border crossing that Syrians were fleeing Russian strikes in panic. The closure of the road to Aleppo risked a much larger scale repeat of crises in Ghouta, a besieged Damascus suburb, or even Madaya, a blockaded town were residents have starved.

“The route to Aleppo is completely closed and this is a road that was feeding all the main arteries inside Syria. Unless this is reopened, you will see Aleppo falling day by day into a similar situation as in Madaya and Ghouta and you will see a deepening humanitarian crisis,” he said.

“They are hitting any vehicles that are on the move, they are hitting aid trucks,” he added. “We really urge that the Russian attacks on Azaz and Aleppo should stop, because if there is such a policy to clear this area of all human beings… then we may not be able to cope with the influx.”

SUPPLY LINE

The Syrian army’s success in opening a route to the Shi’ite towns of Nubul and Zahraa enabled it to cut a highway that linked rebel held areas in the northern countryside with the eastern part of Aleppo held by insurgents since 2012.

The latest gains by the Syrian government bring it to the closest point to the Turkish border since August 2013, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

The capture of the towns of Mayer and then Kafin, just north of Nubul and Zahraa, in the past 24 hrs have opened the road toward Tal Rifaat, the next focus of the army assault. The capture of that would leave only the town of Azaz before the Turkish border itself.

The loss of Azaz, just a few miles from the Bab al Salama border crossing, would virtually wipe out insurgents from one of their main strongholds in northwest Syria, though they still control much of nearby Idlib province.

Russian bombing has for weeks targeted rebel routes to the main border crossing, once a major gateway from Europe and Turkey to the Gulf and Iraq, lately a lifeline for rebel-held areas in Idlib and Aleppo provinces.

The army’s advance has also been indirectly helped by Kurdish-led YPG fighters who control the city of Afrin, southwest of Azaz. They have seized a string of villages in recent days, rebels and the Observatory said.

In a multi-sided civil war that has drawn in global and regional powers, the Kurds are the strongest allies on the ground in Syria of a U.S.-led coalition bombing Islamic State in eastern Syria and northern Iraq. Turkey supports other rebel groups against Assad and is hostile to the Syrian Kurds, which it sees as allies of its own Kurdish separatists.

Russia joined the war last year with air strikes that it says are aimed at Islamic State, but which Turkey, Arab states and the West say are aimed mostly at other opponents of Assad.

Four months of Russian air strikes have tipped momentum Assad’s way. With Moscow’s help and allies including Lebanon’s Hezbollah and Iranian fighters, the Syrian army is regaining areas on key fronts in the west.

United Nations investigators called for new sanctions on Syrian officials as well as leaders of the two most hardline rebel groups, Islamic State and the Nusra Front, accusing the three of mass killings, torture and disappearances of civilians in custody.

Speaking in Ankara, Merkel, under fire at home over the refugee crisis, said Europe needed to follow up quickly on pledges of aid to help Turkey cope with the Syria exodus, and also urged Ankara to act fast to improve the situation for refugees.

(Additional reporting by Nick Tattersall in Istanbul, Yesim Dikmen and Ercan Gurses in Ankara and Stephanie Nebehay in Geneva; writing by Suleiman al-Khalidi and Philippa Fletcher; editing by Peter Graff and Pravin Char)

Thousands flee as Russian-backed offensive threatens to besiege Aleppo

BEIRUT (Reuters) – Tens of thousands of Syrians fled an intensifying Russian assault around Aleppo on Friday, and aid workers said they feared the major city could soon fall under a full government siege.

Iran reported one of its generals had been killed on the front line, giving direct confirmation of the role Tehran is playing along with Moscow in what appears to be one of the most determined offensives in five years of civil war.

The government assault around Aleppo, and advances in the south and northwest, helped to torpedo Geneva peace talks this week. Russia’s intervention has tipped the war President Bashar al-Assad’s way, reversing gains rebels made last year.

The last two days saw government troops and their Lebanese and Iranian allies fully encircle the countryside north of Aleppo and cut off the main supply route linking the city – Syria’s largest before the war – to Turkey. Ankara said it suspected the aim was to starve the population into submission.

Aleppo would be the biggest strategic prize in years for Assad’s government in a conflict that has killed at least 250,000 people and driven 11 million from their homes.

Video footage showed thousands of people massing at the Bab al-Salam crossing on the Turkish border. Men carried luggage on their heads, and the elderly and those unable to walk were brought in wheelchairs. Women sat on the side of the road holding babies and waiting to be allowed into Turkey.

Rights group Amnesty International urged Turkey to let in those fleeing the latest violence, after reports the border remained closed.

“It feels like a siege of Aleppo is about to begin,” said David Evans, Middle East program director for the U.S. aid agency Mercy Corps, which said the most direct humanitarian route to Aleppo had been severed.

“The situation in Aleppo is a humanitarian catastrophe,” said an opposition spokesman still in Geneva after the ill-fated peace talks. “The international community must take urgent, concrete steps to address it.”

NON-STOP RUSSIAN AIR STRIKES

“The Russian (air) cover continues night and day, there were more than 250 air strikes on this area in one day,” Hassan Haj Ali, head of Liwa Suqour al-Jabal, a rebel group fighting in northwest Syria, told Reuters.

“The regime is now trying to expand the area it has taken control of,” he added. “Now the northern countryside (of Aleppo) is totally encircled, and the humanitarian situation is very difficult.”

Syrian state TV and a monitoring group said the army and its allies had seized the town of Ratyan north of Aleppo. Haj Ali said the town had not yet fallen, but that there were “very heavy battles”.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group said some 120 fighters on all sides had been killed around Ratyan.

Hezbollah’s Al Manar TV and Syrian state TV later on Friday said forces had taken another nearby town, Mayer.

The Syrian army and its allies broke a years-long rebel blockade of two Shi’ite towns in Aleppo province on Wednesday, cutting off a major supply line from Turkey to Aleppo.

Aleppo, Syria’s commercial hub, has been divided for years between a section under government control and areas in the grip of rebels. Much of the UNESCO heritage old city is in ruins.

Any government siege would target the rebel-held parts, where more than 350,000 people live. Well over a million live in the areas under government control.

Haj Ali said most of the fighters on the government side were “Iranian and from Hezbollah, or Afghan”.

A non-Syrian senior security source close to Damascus told Reuters on Thursday that Qassem Soleimani, commander of foreign operations of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps, was overseeing operations in the Aleppo area.

Iran’s semi-official Tasnim news agency said Revolutionary Guard Corps Brigadier-General Mohsen Ghajarian had been killed in Aleppo province, as had six Iranian volunteer militiamen.

The five-year-old civil war pits the government led by Assad, a member of the Alawite sect derived from Shi’ite Islam, against a range of insurgents who are mainly Sunni Muslims, backed by Saudi Arabia, other Arab states and Turkey. Western countries have lined up in opposition to Assad.

Since 2014, the Sunni jihadist group Islamic State has run a self-proclaimed caliphate in eastern Syria and Iraq, under air assault from a U.S.-led coalition. Russia launched its own separate air campaign four months ago to aid its ally Assad, transforming the battlefield.

But swathes of the country are still in the hands of armed rebels, including Islamic State in the east, Kurdish militia in the north, and a mosaic of groups in the west who have been the target of many of the Russian air strikes.

ARMY GAINS IN DERAA

Syria’s government forces and allies have made further gains in the southern province of Deraa, recapturing a town just outside Deraa city.

It has been backed by some of the heaviest Russian air strikes since it began its bombing campaign in September, a rebel spokesman in the area said.

The talks convened this week in Geneva were the first diplomatic attempt to end the war in two years but collapsed before they began in earnest. The opposition refused to negotiate while Russia was escalating its bombing and government troops were advancing.

NATO said Moscow’s intensified bombing campaign undermined the peace efforts and warned Russia was creating tensions by violating the airspace of Syria’s neighbor Turkey, a NATO member which shot down a Russian warplane in November.

Russia has accused Turkey of preparing a military incursion into northern Syria. Ankara dismissed this as propaganda intended to conceal Russia’s own “crimes”. Aleppo was threatened with a “siege of starvation”, and Turkey had the right to take any measures to protect its security, it said.

Moscow says its targets in Syria are restricted to Islamic State and al Qaeda’s Syrian branch, the Nusra Front, both of which were excluded from peace talks and unacceptable to the countries supporting the insurgents against Assad.

“Why did the opposition that left Geneva complain about the offensive in Aleppo, which is actually targeted against Jabhat al-Nusra (Nusra Front) and other radical extremist groups?” said Russia’s ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva, Alexey Borodavkin.

That position is rejected by Western and Arab countries, which say most Russian strikes are against other opponents of Assad, not the banned groups.

Nusra Front said in a statement on Friday it had killed 25 Iranian fighters and Shi’ite militiamen in fighting in Aleppo.

“The intense Russia air strikes, mainly targeting opposition groups in Syria, is undermining the efforts to find a political solution to the conflict,” said NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg.

Russian violations of Turkish airspace were “causing increased tensions and … create risks”.

Saudi Arabia said it was ready to participate in separate U.S. ground operations against Islamic State. The United States welcomed the Saudi offer, although Washington so far has committed only to small scale operations by special forces units on the ground in Syria.

(Additional reporting by Suleiman Al-Khalidi in Amman, Humeyra Pamuk in Istanbul, Parisa Hafezi in Ankara and Tom Miles in Geneva; writing by John Davison and Peter Graff; editing by Andrew Roche)

Russia and Turkey trade accusations over Syria

BEIRUT/MOSCOW/LONDON (Reuters) – Russia said on Thursday it suspected Turkey was preparing a military incursion into Syria, as a Syrian army source said Aleppo would soon be encircled by government forces with Russian air support.

Turkey in turn accused Moscow of trying to divert attention from its own “crimes” in Syria, and said Aleppo was threatened with a “siege of starvation”. It said Turkey had the right to take any measures to protect its security.

In another sign of the spreading international ramifications of the five-year-old Syrian war, Saudi Arabia said it was ready to participate in ground operations against Islamic State in Syria if the U.S.-led alliance decided to launch them.

The United Nations on Wednesday suspended the first peace talks in two years, halting an effort that seemed doomed from the start as the war raged unabated. Washington said on Thursday however it was hopeful they would resume by the end of the month, and Russia said it expected that no later than Feb. 25.

Donors convened in London to tackle the refugee crisis created by the conflict. British Prime Minister David Cameron said they raised $11 billion for Syrian humanitarian needs over the next four years.

Turkey said at the conference up to 70,000 refugees from Aleppo were moving toward the border to escape air strikes.

BORDER MARCH

Footage online showed hundreds of people, mostly women, children and the elderly, marching toward Turkey’s Onucpinar border gate, carrying carpets, blankets and food on their backs.

Four months of Russian air strikes have tipped the momentum of the war Assad’s way. With Moscow’s help and allies including Lebanon’s Hezbollah and Iranian fighters, the Syrian army is regaining areas on key fronts in the west.

Russia’s defense ministry said it had registered “a growing number of signs of hidden preparation of the Turkish Armed Forces for active actions on the territory of Syria”.

Any Turkish incursion would risk direct confrontation between Russia and a NATO member.

“The Russians are trying to hide their crimes in Syria,” said a senior official in Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu’s office.

“They are simply diverting attention from their attacks on civilians as a country already invading Syria. Turkey has all the rights to take any measures to protect its own security.”

In London, Davutoglu said the “humanitarian logistic corridor” between Turkey and Aleppo was “under the invasion of these foreign fighters and regime forces (with) the support of Russian warplanes”.

“What they want to do in Aleppo today is exactly what they did in Madaya before, a siege of starvation,” he added.

Davutoglu pledged that whatever the cost Turkey’s door would remain open to all Syrians. It has already taken in more than 2.5 million.

Relations between Russia and Turkey have deteriorated badly since Turkey shot down a Russian warplane near the Syrian border in November.

ALEPPO, STRATEGIC PRIZE

Aleppo, just 50 km (30 miles) south of the Turkish border, is a major strategic prize in the war and is currently divided into areas of government and opposition control. Many of the rebels fighting in and around the city have close ties to Turkey.

This week, three days of intensive Russian bombing helped the army and allied fighters to sever a major supply line to the northwest of the city, in the process reaching two Shi’ite towns loyal to the government for the first time in 3-1/2 years.

The army source said operations to fully encircle Aleppo from the west would be launched soon.

A senior, non-Syrian security source close to Damascus said Iranian fighters had played a crucial role.

“Qassem Soleimani is there in the same area,” said the source, referring to the head of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards’ elite Quds force responsible for overseas operations.

Residents thanked Assad, Iran and Hezbollah in celebratory scenes from the Shi’ite towns of Nubul and al-Zahraa broadcast by Hezbollah’s al-Manar TV.

The powerful Kurdish YPG militia, which controls wide areas of northern Syria, meanwhile added to the pressure on insurgents, capturing two villages near Nubul and al-Zahraa, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported.

The Syrian Kurds have consistently denied opposition claims that they cooperate with Damascus.

All diplomatic efforts toward ending the conflict have failed. U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said the latest steps in peace talks were undermined by increased aerial bombing. U.N. envoy Staffan de Mistura announced a three-week pause.

“I think the special envoy decided to suspend the talks because the organization did not want to be associated with the Russian escalation in Syria, which risks undermining the talks completely,” a U.N. official told Reuters.

Mohammad Javad Zarif, foreign minister of Iran, called in London for the talks to resume and for an immediate ceasefire. But he said later that should not mean stopping military operations against “recognized terrorist organizations”, naming the Nusra Front and Islamic State.

REBELS HOPE FOR MORE WEAPONS

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov had agreed on the need to discuss how to implement a ceasefire in Syria during a call on Thursday.

Rebel commanders said they hoped the peace talks’ collapse would convince their foreign backers, including Saudi Arabia, that it was time to send them more powerful and advanced weapons, including anti-aircraft missiles.

Assad’s foreign opponents have been funneling weapons to vetted rebel groups via both Turkey and Jordan.

One rebel leader said he expected “something new, God willing” after the failure of the Geneva talks.

Another rebel commander said: “They are promising to continue the support. In what form, I don’t yet know … How it will crystallize, nobody knows … We need to wait.”

Both spoke on condition of anonymity.

While vetted “Free Syrian Army” rebels have received weapons including U.S.-made guided anti-tank missiles, their calls for anti-aircraft missiles have gone unanswered mostly because of fears they could end up in the hands of powerful jihadist groups such as the Nusra Front, which are also fighting Assad.

A Russian defense ministry spokesman said a Russian military trainer was killed in a mortar attack on Feb. 1.

“They (Russian military servicemen) are not taking part in ground operations,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters. “We are talking about advisers. This is linked to teaching Syrian colleagues to operate equipment which is being delivered to Syria under existing contracts.”

A Saudi general said the kingdom was “ready to participate in any ground operations that the (U.S.-led) coalition (against Islamic State) may agree to carry out in Syria”.

Brigadier General Ahmed Asseri, who is also the spokesman for the Saudi-led Arab coalition fighting Iranian-backed forces in Yemen, was speaking to Saudi-owned al-Arabiya TV.

(Additional reporting by Istanbul, Washington and Dubai bureaux; editing by Andrew Roche)

Billions pledged for Syria as tens of thousands flee bombardments

LONDON (Reuters) – Donor nations pledged on Thursday to give billions of dollars in aid to Syrians as world leaders gathered for a conference to tackle the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, with Turkey reporting a new exodus of tens of thousands fleeing air strikes.

With Syria’s five-year-old civil war raging and another attempt at peace negotiations called off in Geneva after just a few days, the London conference aims to address the needs of some 6 million people displaced within Syria and more than 4 million refugees in other countries.

Underlining the desperate situation on the ground in Syria, Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu told the meeting that tens of thousands of Syrians were on the move toward his country to escape aerial bombardments on the city of Aleppo.

“Sixty to seventy thousand people in the camps in north Aleppo are moving toward Turkey. My mind is not now in London, but on our border – how to relocate these new people coming from Syria?” he said. “Three hundred thousand people living in Aleppo are ready to move toward Turkey.”

Turkey is already hosting more than 2.5 million Syrian refugees. Jordan and Lebanon are the other countries bearing the brunt of the Syrian refugee exodus.

Several speakers said that while the situation of refugees was bad, that of Syrians trapped inside the country enduring bombardments, sieges and, in some places, starvation was far worse.

“With people reduced to eating grass and leaves and killing stray animals in order to survive on a day-to-day basis, that is something that should tear at the conscience of all civilized people and we all have a responsibility to respond to it,” U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry told the conference.

A U.N. envoy halted his attempts to conduct Syrian peace talks on Wednesday after the Syrian army, backed by Russian air strikes, advanced against rebel forces north of Aleppo, choking opposition supply lines from Turkey to the city.

Kerry told the conference he had spoken to his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov about the situation.

“We have agreed that we are engaged in a discussion about how to implement the ceasefire specifically as well as some immediate, possible confidence-building steps to deliver humanitarian assistance,” he said.

In a blunt attack on Russia, Turkey’s Davutoglu told a news conference that those supporting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s forces were committing war crimes and called on the United States to adopt a more decisive stance against Russia.

EDUCATION, JOBS

United Nations agencies are appealing for $7.73 billion to cope with the Syrian emergency this year, and countries in the region are asking for an additional $1.2 billion.

Conference co-hosts Britain, Norway and Germany were the first to announce their pledges, followed by the United States, the European Union, Japan and other nations.

Britain and Norway promised an extra $1.76 billion and $1.17 billion respectively by 2020, while Germany said it would give $2.57 billion by 2018. The United States said its contribution this fiscal year would be $890 million.

The almost five-year-old conflict has killed an estimated 250,000 people and stoked the spread of Islamist militancy across the Middle East and North Africa.

For European nations, improving the humanitarian situation in Syria and neighboring countries is crucial to reducing incentives for Syrians to travel to Europe.

U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said the first steps in the Geneva peace talks had been undermined by a lack of sufficient humanitarian access and by a sudden increase in aerial bombing and military activity on the ground.

“The coming days should be used to get back to the table, not to secure more gains on the battlefield,” he said.

The conference will focus particularly on the need to provide an education for displaced Syrian children and job opportunities for adults, reflecting growing recognition that the fallout from the Syrian war will be very long-term.

(Additional reporting by Andreas Rinke and Arshad Mohammed, writing by Estelle Shirbon; Editing by Mark Heinrich and Raissa Kasolowsky)

Walls and watchtowers rise as Turkey tries to seal border against Islamic State

ELBEYLI, Turkey (Reuters) – Slabs of concrete wall have sprung up and military patrols have intensified, but local people say this stretch of Turkey’s border facing Syrian territory under Islamic State control is still far from water-tight.

Ankara is under intense pressure from its NATO allies to seal off the 40-mile strip that stretches from just east of the Turkish town of Kilis to Karkamis, long a conduit for fighters, smuggled goods and war materiel.

Beyond a string of tiny villages nestled in undulating fig and olive groves lies the last stretch of Syrian territory on Turkey’s southern frontier that Islamic State militants still hold, following advances by rival Kurdish rebels.

European governments fear that their own citizens who have fought with the jihadists could still cross back into Turkey before heading home to stage attacks.

Likewise, the United States believes Turkey, which has NATO’s second largest army, must close the frontier if Islamic State is to be defeated in Syria.

Soldiers patrol in armored vehicles along a border delineated in some places by little more than razor-wire fence. Additional watchtowers and huts have appeared in recent months, and three-meter (10 foot)-high concrete slabs are being erected along some of the most vulnerable sections.

But the efforts by a nation which had long been criticized for failing to do more to prevent the passage of foreign fighters appear to have come too late to stop Islamic State networks developing inside Turkey.

Washington and Ankara have been discussing for months how to seal this stretch of border. Senior U.S. officials said last month they would offer Turkey technology including surveillance balloons and anti-tunneling equipment.

Border security is now undoubtedly tighter but, for those wanting to sneak over, not absolute – and help remains available for a price.

“It’s difficult, but not impossible,” said Ismail, a 37-year old who described himself as a trader, smoking a cigarette in a tea house near the village of Akinci.

“Let’s say you want to cross. You tell me where and when and I can call people who will make it happen,” he said. “But you would have to pay more.”

The military’s own figures suggest attempts to cross into Islamic State-held Syrian territory have continued, showing 121 people tried over the past 10 days alone. Almost half were children, and at least a dozen were foreigners.

Nevertheless, it is cracking down on those trying to spirit people over the border.

“The security is very tight now, soldiers give the smugglers no respite,” said Abbas, 51, a farmer near the Turkish border town of Elbeyli, as two soldiers carrying rifles passed by his house, walking toward their outpost a few hundred meters away.

Last year, Abbas was so alarmed by the numbers of people crossing illicitly into Syria under his nose that he emailed a government bureau, set up years ago for citizens to register complaints, queries and concerns. It receives more than a million inquiries a year and Abbas said he never heard back.

“It was literally a flood of people here,” he said, describing how some in his village made a fortune shuttling people back and forth to the border fence, often doing a dozen trips a night, until the flow largely stopped about a month ago.

Several residents in other border villages and towns confirmed security had been tightened, but emphasized that did not mean the two-way traffic had dried up.

KILLINGS IN TURKEY

Turkey launched what it called a “synchronized war on terror” last July, opening up its Incirlik air base to countries in the U.S.-led coalition bombing Islamic State. Most of its own air strikes, however, have been against Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) militants battling for Kurdish autonomy in its southeast.

Turkish tanks and artillery bombarded Islamic State positions in Syria and Iraq in the days after a suicide bomber blew himself up among groups of tourists in the heart of Istanbul last month, killing 10 Germans.

The security forces have also stepped up raids against Islamic State in cities across Turkey, detaining more than 1,000 alleged members and uncovering urban cells.

“We have never allowed Islamic State to use our territory to cross into Syria and we will not allow them … We see Islamic State as an extremely serious threat and we don’t want them on our border,” a senior government official told Reuters.

Turkey has increasingly become a target itself for the Sunni Muslim radicals. The Istanbul bombing followed a suicide attack in Ankara in October that killed more than 100 people and a bombing in the border town of Suruc last July, both of which were blamed on Islamic State fighters.

Diplomats and analysts say Ankara woke up late to the threat, allowing Islamic State to develop networks of sympathizers, a charge the government rejects.

“These networks are tapped into well-established al Qaeda networks inside Turkey … They were already there and they operated with little interference until March 2015,” Aaron Stein, senior fellow at the Atlantic Council said, nothing a marked increased in arrests thereafter.

Aside from the high-profile suicide bombings, Islamic State sympathizers have been able to carry out targeted attacks inside Turkish territory along the border in recent months.

Naji Jerf, a Syrian activist and documentary maker who made a film about Islamic State and had lived in Turkey’s southeastern city of Gaziantep since 2012, was gunned down on the street in broad daylight last December.

A couple of months earlier, two other Syrian activists who worked for Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently (RBSS), a campaign group against Islamic State, were shot in the head and beheaded in the nearby city of Sanliurfa.

Jerf and the two activists had appealed to the Turkish police after they received death threats, friends and fellow activists in Istanbul and Gaziantep told Reuters.

“Naji went to the police after somebody tried to break into his car,” said his friend Manhal Bareesh, a journalist based in Gaziantep but originally from Syria’s Idlib province.

“He suspected they were trying to plant a bomb in his car. But the Turkish police wrote a report and told him not to worry,” Bareesh said.

Three people have been detained in Gaziantep in relation to Jerf’s murder, according to local media, but the killings have alarmed the Syrian immigrant community.

(Editing by Nick Tattersall and David Stamp)

U.N. halts Syria peace talks as government closes in on Aleppo

GENEVA (Reuters) – A United Nations envoy halted his attempts to conduct Syrian peace talks on Wednesday after the army, backed by Russian air strikes, advanced against rebel forces north of Aleppo, choking opposition supply lines from Turkey to the city.

Staffan de Mistura announced a three-week pause in the Geneva talks, the first attempt to negotiate an end to Syria’s war in two years, saying they needed immediate help from the rival sides’ international backers, principally the United States and Russia.

“I have indicated from the first day that I won’t talk for the sake of talking,” the envoy, who has described the negotiations as Syria’s last hope, told reporters.

Washington and Moscow’s support for opposite sides in the five-year-old war, which has drawn in regional states, created millions of refugees and enabled the rise of Islamic State, means a local conflict has become an increasingly fraught global standoff.

De Mistura has said a ceasefire is essential but Russia refused to suspend its air strikes. They helped government forces end a three-and-a-half year siege of the Shi’ite towns of Nubul and al-Zahraa on Wednesday, a step toward recapturing all of Aleppo, Syria’s biggest city before the war.

“I don’t see why these air strikes should be stopped,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said, saying they were targeting al Qaeda-linked rebels.

Opposition delegation co-ordinator Riad Hijab said there would be no ceasefire until a transition without President Bashar al-Assad was in place.

Moscow accuses Washington, which is backing opponents of Assad, of supporting terrorists, while the U.S. State Department said the air strikes around Aleppo focused mainly on Assad’s foes rather than the Islamic State militants Russia says it is trying to defeat.

The United Nations said it had been told hundreds of families had been uprooted following “an unprecedented frequency” of air strikes in the past two days. Three aid workers were among the dead.

Its envoy had formally opened the peace talks on Friday but both sides denied they had ever begun.

Aleppo rebel factions, reeling from the assault, told the opposition delegation late on Tuesday they would bring down the negotiations within three days unless the offensive ended, a source close to the talks said.

De Mistura halted the talks until Feb. 25 after meeting the opposition.

“I have concluded frankly that after the first week of preparatory talks there is more work to be done, not only by us but by the stakeholders,” de Mistura said.

French Foreign Minister Fabius Laurent Fabius said his government supported De Mistura’s decision and he accused Assad and his allies of “torpedoing” the peace effort.

The opposition’s Hijab said the pause gave the West a chance to put pressure on the Assad government and Russia to end their assault and that he would not return until there was a change on the ground.

NO END TO RUSSIAN STRIKES

Government delegation chief Bashar al-Ja’afari accused the opposition of pulling out of the talks because it was losing the fight.

Developments on the ground were crucial,” he said, accusing de Mistura of providing them with political cover.

“Those who have the responsibility of this failure are the Saudis, Turks and Qataris. They are the real handlers and masters of the Riyadh group.”

Aleppo, 50 km (30 miles) south of the Turkish border, was Syria’s most populous city before the country’s descent into civil war. It has been partitioned into zones of government and insurgent control since 2012.

If the government regains control, it would be a big blow to insurgents’ hopes of toppling Assad after a war that has divided Syria between western areas still governed from Damascus and the rest of the country run by a patchwork of rebels.

The Levant Front rebel group said the breaking of the sieges of the Aleppo villages of Nubul and Zahraa came only after more than 500 raids by Russian airplanes.

One commander said opposition-held areas of the divided city were at risk of being encircled entirely by the government and allied militia, and appealed to foreign states that back the rebels to send more weapons.

Diplomats and opposition members said they were taken by surprise when de Mistura called for immediate efforts to begin ceasefire negotiations despite there being no official talks or goodwill measures from the Syrian government.

The opposition has said it will not negotiate unless the government stops bombarding civilian areas, lifts blockades on besieged towns and releases detainees.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which monitors the war, said Russian and Syrian warplanes launched dozens of strikes on the rebel towns of Hayan and Hreitan in northern Aleppo on Wednesday.

“Less than 3 km separate the regime from cutting all routes to opposition-held Aleppo,” Observatory director Rami Abdulrahman said. “It did in three days what it failed to do in 3-1/2 years.”

A U.S. official in Geneva called for an end to the daily bombing of civilians by Russian and government warplanes.

(Additional reporting by Firas Makdesi, Cecile Mantovani, Kinda Makieh and Stephanie Nebehay in Geneva, Mariam Karouny, Tom Perry and Suleiman Al-Khalidi in Beirut and Fatma Al Arini in Muscat; writing by Andrew Roche and Philippa Fletcher; editing by)