Children are reportedly trapped inside a building under attack in besieged Aleppo, the UN’s children agency has said, amid reports that forces loyal to the regime of Bashar al-Assad are carrying out extrajudicial killings in areas of the city recently reclaimed from the Syrian opposition.

“According to alarming reports from a doctor in the city, many children, possibly more than 100, unaccompanied or separated from their families, are trapped in a building, under heavy attack in east Aleppo,” Unicef said in a statement. “We urge all parties to the conflict to allow the safe and immediate evacuation of all children.”



The UN’s human rights office said earlier there were reliable accounts that pro-Syrian regime forces have been entering homes in the last remaining rebel strongholds in eastern Aleppo and killing civilians on the spot.

Multiple sources told the UN that 82 civilians had been killed across four different neighbourhoods. “The reports we had are of people being shot in the street trying to flee and shot in their homes,” Rupert Colville, a UN spokesman, said. “There could be many more.”

Unverified accounts of extrajudicial killings by forces loyal to Assad, as well as mass detentions and arrests, have surfaced in recent days. In one image circulated by a pro-government parliamentarian, dozens of Syrian men and boys from east Aleppo stand in a detention camp in front of Syrian army soldiers.



The Turkish foreign ministry said it was horrified and outraged by what it described as a massacre of civilians, in serious breach of international law.

“We’re seeing the most cruel form of savagery in Aleppo, and the regime and its supporters are responsible for this,” foreign minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu said, adding that his country was was negotiating with Russia to implement a ceasefire. “The wounded are not being let out and people are dying of starvation,” he told a news conference in Ankara.

Meanwhile, the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, said Moscow was fed up of calls from the US to halt the fighting. “We are tired of hearing this whining from our American colleagues in the current administration,” he told journalists. The US was urging Russia to halt military action while doing nothing to separate moderate rebels from “terrorists” in Aleppo, he added.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said there were corpses abandoned in the streets with residents too terrified by the shelling to bury them. Real massacres were taking place in the city, the war monitor said. Jens Laerke, a UN spokesman, said it looked like there had been a “complete meltdown of humanity” in the city.

The Red Cross has urgently appealed for civilians in east Aleppo to be protected “before it is too late”, adding that it was ready to help with evacuations if an agreement could be reached as Assad’s forces closed in on remaining opposition enclaves.

“We need to act now,” said Pawel Krzysiek, the head of communications at the international committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), who is in Aleppo. “We need to depoliticise the process of protecting civilians. We need to put their lives first. And we need to do it now before it is not too late.”

Show more

Tens of thousands of civilians remain trapped in a shrinking patch of opposition territory in east Aleppo, weeks into an offensive led by Assad’s military and Iranian-backed militias, and supported by Russian airpower, that has brought them within reach of a key victory in the war.

People in east Aleppo, who have issued distress calls and appeals to the international community to rescue them from retribution, continued to post farewell messages overnight and into Tuesday morning, predicting they would either die by the ongoing bombardment or be tortured and killed if they surrendered.

“Please just tell our stories to the world, please let my son be proud of his father,” said one resident of east Aleppo in a text message.

A doctor described the situation as “beyond a tragedy”, with corpses in the street and people attempting to flee to government-held areas as a result of hunger and cold.

“We are besieged from all sides and death is coming from the air,” he said. “Remember that there was once a city called Aleppo that the world erased from the camp and from history. This is a farewell message [from a doctor] whose fate along with that of his companions is death or arrest at any moment.”

One resident said the airstrikes had subsided by Tuesday morning due to lower visibility and rain, offering a brief respite to civilians who were still on the move and seeking shelter in the rebel districts. Some of those attempting to find shelter away from the frontlines were carrying blood and IV drips as they marched through rebel-held districts, another resident said.

The Syrian army and its allies are in the “last moments before declaring victory” in Aleppo, a Syrian military source told Reuters, after rebel defences collapsed on Monday, leaving insurgents in a tiny, heavily bombarded pocket of ground.

The bombardment of rebel areas of the city continued nonstop on Monday during the day in what residents called a “doomsday” scenario.

“The battle in eastern Aleppo should end quickly. They [rebels] don’t have much time. They either have to surrender or die,” Lieut Gen Zaid al-Saleh, the head of the government’s Aleppo security committee, told reporters in the recaptured Sheikh Saeed district of the city.

The ICRC said: “Thousands of civilians’ lives are in danger as frontlines close in around them in eastern Aleppo. As the battle reaches new peaks and the area is plunged into chaos, thousands with no part in the violence have literally nowhere safe to run.