Airstrikes kill 15 more, tax Aleppo hospitals

BEIRUT - Hospitals in the northern Syrian city of Aleppo are overwhelmed with casualties, an international aid group said Tuesday, as government warplanes blasted opposition areas of the city as part of a three-day air assault that has killed more than 100 people.

The intensified air campaign, which one activist group in the city called “unprecedented,” suggests President Bashar Assad’s government is trying to crush opposition in the contested city, Syria’s largest, ahead of an international peace conference scheduled for late January in Switzerland, analysts said.

Aleppo has been a major front in Syria’s civil war since the rebels launched an offensive there in mid-2012, and the city has since been carved into opposition- and government-held areas. On Tuesday, the main Western-backed opposition group, the Syrian National Council, accused the international community of “failing to take any serious position that would guarantee a stop to the bloodbath” ahead of the peace talks.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said airstrikes Tuesday killed 15 people, including two children, in the rebel-held Shaar district.

Tuesday marked the third consecutive day that Aleppo has been hit by deadly government airstrikes.

On Sunday, at least 76 people, including 28 children, died in air raids, according to the Observatory. Other opposition groups reported higher death tolls. Another round of government airstrikes Monday killed at least 12, the Observatory said.

The aid group Doctors Without Borders said in a statement Tuesday that hospitals in Aleppo have been overwhelmed by the influx of wounded from the attacks, which have “emptied stocks of critical drugs and medical materials for lifesaving procedures.”

Also Tuesday, a minister in Britain’s Foreign Office accused Assad’s government of effectively murdering a British doctor held in Syrian custody.

Dr. Abbas Khan, a 32-yearold orthopedic surgeon from London, was seized by government troops in Aleppo in November 2012 after he entered the country on a humanitarian mission.

“There is no excuse whatsoever for the treatment that he has suffered by the Syrian authorities who have in effect murdered a British national who was in their country to help people,” said Hugh Robertson, the head of the Foreign Office’s Mideast concerns.

The Foreign Office had said earlier that it was “extremely concerned” by reports Khan had died in detention. There was no immediate response from the Syrian government about the case.

Syria’s nearly 3-year-old conflict has escalated in recent weeks as both sides maneuver ahead of next month’s planned peace talks and despite calls for a cease-fire.

The latest came from United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, who said the situation in Syria has “deteriorated beyond all imagination” and insisted Monday that the fighting stop before political dialogue on Syria can start.

Nearly 9 million Syrians have been uprooted from their homes by the conflict, with some 2.3 million fleeing into neighboring countries and millions of others searching for shelter in safer parts of Syria.

The U.S.- and Russian-brokered peace conference between Assad’s government and the Syrian opposition is to begin in January in the Swiss city of Montreux. Plans are underway to organize a one-day meeting of foreign ministers in the city ahead of the talks, U.N. officials said Tuesday.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and more than two dozen other foreign ministers are expected to attend the Jan. 22 meeting.

The conference will reconvene Jan. 24 for the start of actual negotiations between Syria’s warring sides, said Khawla Mattar, a spokesman for the U.N.’s special envoy to Syria, Lakhdar Brahimi.

Meanwhile, all the elements for ridding Syria of its declared stockpile of toxic chemicals are in place but the effort could be delayed, an official from the global chemical weapons watchdog said Tuesday after the group’s executive council reviewed the plan.

The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons’ 41-nation council asked Director-General Ahmet Uzumcu to report back Jan. 7 on progress in executing the Syrian plan, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the organization was not planning to release details until today.

According to a timeline agreed upon earlier, the most toxic chemicals in Syria’s weapons program were to have been removed from the country by Dec. 31 and Syria’s entire chemical weapons program should be gone by mid-2014.

But those deadlines have been cast into doubt by poor security in Syria and by logistical issues.

Information for this article was contributed by Ryan Lucas, Barbara Surk, Zeina Karam, John Heilprin, Cassandra Vinograd, Raphael Satter, Albert Aji and Mike Corder of The Associated Press.

Front Section, Pages 7 on 12/18/2013

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