A Syrian army soldier places a Syrian flag during a battle with rebel fighters at the Ramouseh front line, east of Aleppo, on Monday. (Hassan Ammar/AP)

Russia and China vetoed a U.N. Security Council proposal to stop fighting in the Syrian city of Aleppo on Monday, thwarting flurried international efforts to end violence that has killed hundreds of civilians in recent weeks.

A Syrian and Iranian-backed push to retake the flash-point city has brought President Bashar al-Assad close to his biggest victory in more than five years of war.

Russia, a key ally of Assad’s, has vetoed several Security Council resolutions aimed at easing the war. On Monday, Russian Ambassador Vitaly Churkin said the latest proposal was rejected because it ignored parallel diplomatic efforts with the United States.

Washington’s representative, Deputy Ambassador Michele Sison, described that remark as a “made-up alibi.”

“We will not let Russia string along the Security Council while waiting for a compromise that never seems to come,” she said.





Aleppo’s rebels rejected calls to withdraw from their shrinking enclave Monday, despite government advances through what was once the opposition’s most important stronghold.

The offensive has boxed the rebels into a small patch of territory, killing at least 500 civilians and shattering the area’s remaining infrastructure.

Yasser al-Youssef, a spokesman for the hard-line Islamist Nour al-Din al-Ziniki faction, insisted that a withdrawal was “unacceptable.” Another rebel representative, Abu Abdel Rahman Al-Hamawi of the Jaish al-Islam group, said his forces would continue “until the last drop of blood.”

But the Aleppo rebels are running out of options. Militarily overwhelmed and weakened by infighting, they face a stark choice: stay in the city and face a near-certain defeat, or retreat to Idlib, a neighboring province and something of a holding pen for Syria’s remaining armed opposition.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a monitoring group, says at least 50,000 civilians fled rebel-held eastern Aleppo last week as government forces, backed by an array of Iran-funded militia, closed in.

As fierce clashes erupted Monday around Aleppo’s Old City — a world-famous heritage site — pro-government forces tightened their grip on opposition-held districts where tens of thousands of people are trapped. Civilians also reported intense bombardment of the al-Zubdiyah neighborhood.

Rebel forces have regularly shelled government-held areas in response. The Russian Defense Ministry said Monday that two of its nurses had been killed in one such attack on a field clinic. Describing the armed opposition as “animals in human form,” a spokesman for the ministry, Igor Konashenkov, blamed the rebellion’s Western backers.

“The blood of our servicemen is on the hands of those who ordered this murder,” he said. “Yes, yes, I mean you, gentlemen, those who cover for the terrorists from the United States, Great Britain and France and other states and entities that sympathize with them.”

Monday’s Security Council veto on action in Syria underscored the in­trac­table divisions among foreign powers that have complicated international efforts to end the war.

Yet Aleppo’s most recent spasm of violence has sparked intense diplomatic activity to stop the fighting, even temporarily.

On Friday, Canada led calls for a U.N. General Assembly meeting on the crisis. In a separate effort, Russia met with Syrian rebel representatives in the Turkish capital, Ankara, to offer an end to the bombing in return for the withdrawal of armed groups from Aleppo.

David Filipov in Moscow contributed to this report.

Read more:

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‘We are alone’: The voices of besieged rebel-held Aleppo

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