BEIRUT -- Syrian authorities backed by Russia on Thursday offered safe corridors out for residents and rebels in the city of Aleppo's besieged quarters.
Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said three routes out of eastern Aleppo would be opened for civilians, who would be given food and medical care. A fourth route would be opened for armed insurgents.
The announcement was followed by a general amnesty offer by Syria's President Bashar Assad for rebels who give up their weapons and surrender to authorities over the next three months, according to the official Syrian Arab News Agency.
The Syrian army also sent text messages calling on rebels to surrender and expel foreign fighters from their midst.
Fliers dropped over eastern Aleppo showed supposed corridors leading to government areas, but the media office for the opposition's civil defense search and rescue group in eastern Aleppo said no safe corridors have been opened.
Ibrahim Haj, director of the media office in Aleppo, said families would probably send their women and children through the corridors if they were deemed secure enough but not men.
"Most of the men -- everyone here -- is wanted by the regime," Haj said. "So, what amnesty?"
He and other activists reported continued fighting and said there were 25 air raids Thursday on eastern Aleppo.
Control of Aleppo, Syria's most populous city before the civil war began five years ago, has been a main objective of the conflicts' combatants. The city has been divided since 2012, with government forces controlling the western half and rebels holding districts in the east.
For days now, Syrian government forces and allied troops have encircled the main rebel enclave in Aleppo, urging fighters there to surrender. The encirclement set the stage for a prolonged siege that the government hopes will eventually starve out and force the rebels to surrender, a tactic Assad's forces have used elsewhere, including in the central city of Homs. Homs, with a population of 200,000, returned almost fully to government control in December after a three-year siege.
The U.N. says Aleppo is now possibly the largest besieged area in Syria, with an estimated 300,000 residents inside. Humanitarian groups have warned of a major catastrophe if the siege continues, while others slammed the safe-corridors offer as insufficient.
The U.N. envoy for Syria, Staffan de Mistura, said he was not consulted on the safe-passages offer, adding that he is looking to see how the United Nations could coordinate with Russia on its plan to help civilians and opposition fighters who lay down their weapons outside Aleppo.
U.N. humanitarian chief Stephen O'Brien said "no one can be forced to flee, by any specific route or to any particular location."
Rights groups said opening safe passages won't avert a catastrophe and does not give Syrian and Russian forces carte blanche to further blockade the opposition-controlled territory.
"The fact that you provide this option doesn't mean that the people who stay behind are legitimate military targets," said Nadim Houry, the deputy Middle East director at Human Rights Watch.
In a new report released Thursday, Human Rights Watch said Russian and Syrian forces have renewed their use of cluster bombs against civilians and rebels in northern Syria.
The New York-based watchdog documented 47 instances in which cluster munitions were used in attacks by pro-government forces across northern Syria in the past two months.
Cluster munitions, which explode in the air, release hundreds of tiny bomblets, posing a long-lasting danger to civilians. More than 100 countries have signed on to a treaty prohibiting their use.
Fears Mount in Aleppo
Rebels and residents of Aleppo said they were skeptical of the safe-corridors offer, saying it presents them with an impossible choice between a slow death if they stay behind and possible detention if they attempt to leave. There was no sign of people massing to leave the besieged parts of the city.
"I will not leave. I will be the last man in the city," said Mohammed Zein Khandakani, 28, a resident of the Maadi neighborhood of Aleppo who volunteers with the city's medical council. "I can't imagine ever seeing a member of this regime one more time."
But Khandakani, formerly a lawyer who was detained for a month in the early days of the protests against the Syrian government, said he was worried about his family.
A father of two -- the youngest a girl of 9 months -- he said that despite the risk of maltreatment and even arrest, he is urging his mother, wife and sister to use the safe passages to leave the city. He said he hopes the Russian role and intense international attention to the humanitarian corridors proposition means the government would abstain from flagrant violations.
Few residents of eastern Aleppo said they expected good treatment if they accepted the government's offer.
"All the passages are going to the Assad regime," said Farida, a doctor in an Aleppo hospital who gave only her first name for safety reasons. Surrendering, she said, would mean, "death or jail," while the latter would eventually mean "death in the jail."
She acknowledged, however, that some civilians want to leave.
Aid groups have been warning of an impending siege, and with it a humanitarian crisis, after government forces cut the last road connecting Aleppo's eastern districts to rebel-held areas to the north.
Zaher Azzaher, an activist in Aleppo, said residents had begun to feel the pinch; one of his neighbors had acquired two barrels of fuel, and scores of people had lined up to get a share, he said.
"People are fighting over two bags of eggplants," he said. "I don't know how these eggplants managed to find their way here."
He said some residents hesitated to eat the food packs dropped from the air, out of fear that they might be poisoned.
Khandakani said life has progressively gotten harder under the 10-day old siege with bread and water shortages and electricity finally going out Wednesday.
"The next 48 hours are fateful for the whole revolution," he said via Whatsapp.
Youssef Rahal, a lawyer from Aleppo who left the city 10 days ago but remains in touch with people inside, said there is no way to get in vegetables or diesel fuel, which rebel-held areas used to buy from the market and transport through the now blockaded Castello Road.
This has affected bread production. "It means some people are getting only a quarter loaf of bread a day," he said.
Russia's defense minister said in televised comments that President Vladimir Putin has ordered a "large-scale humanitarian operation" that will begin outside Aleppo to help civilians as well as allow fighters who wanted to lay down their arms to surrender.
Shoigu said three corridors will be open for civilians and fighters who lay down their arms and a fourth corridor will provide fighters a "safe exit with weapons."
Bahaa Halabi, an opposition media activist inside Aleppo, said there are no corridors out of east Aleppo and even if there were, he would not take them.
"Definitely not. We will not surrender ourselves to the criminals. They are killing us every day. Slaughtering us, starving us, and besieging civilians," he said, speaking from the city via Skype.
Assad has issued amnesty offers several times during Syria's civil war, now in its sixth year. The latest offer, like those before it, is largely seen by opposition fighters as a publicity stunt and psychological warfare against the rebels. More than a quarter of a million people have died and millions have been displaced since March 2011, when Syria's conflict broke out.
Khandakani said the offensive and siege is depriving him of his "brief feelings of independence and freedom" living in the part of the city under rebel control since 2012.
"I am still waiting for a miracle. Something extraordinary, like the rebels for instance managing to open a corridor for us toward the liberated rural areas," he said.
Split from al-Qaida
Separately, the leader of Syria's Nusra Front -- one of the factions fighting in the chaos of Syria's many-faceted war -- said in recording aired Thursday that his group is changing its name, claiming it will have no more ties with al-Qaida in an attempt to undermine a potential U.S. and Russian air campaign against its fighters.
The Nusra Front's leader, Abu Mohammed al-Golani, made his first appearance showing his face in the video message, aired on the Syrian opposition station Orient TV and Al-Jazeera.
Sitting between two members of the Nusra Front's senior leadership, al-Golani said the delinking from al-Qaida aimed to remove "pretexts" by the U.S. and Russia to strike other rebel groups while claiming they are targeting the Nusra Front.
"We decided to cancel work under the name of Nusra Front and form a new group under a new front called the Levant Conquest Front. This new front will have no links to any outside groups," he said.
The announcement of the split came hours after a deputy to al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahiri said al-Qaida had ordered the split in the interests of "the good of Islam and the Muslims."
"This is a step from us, and a call from us, to all the factions in Sham [Syria] to unify in what Allah approves of, and to work together," said the deputy, Ahmed Hassan Abu al-Khayr, in a video released by Jabhat al-Nusra.
The United States, which considers the Nusra Front a terrorist organization, immediately expressed its skepticism. White House spokesman Josh Earnest said Thursday that the U.S. continues to assess that Nusra Front leaders intend to attack the West and said the U.S.-led military campaign is focused on a number of extremist groups, including the Nusra Front and the Islamic State.
The fact that al-Qaida appears to have mandated the separation also will not help convince skeptics that the new group has really severed its ties or loyalties to al-Qaida, said Ludovico Carlino of the IHS risk consultancy group. Rather, he said, it "reflects al-Qaida's gradualist approach of progressively radicalizing local populations, postponing the establishment of an Islamic state until popular support has been secured."
Information for this article was contributed by Sarah El Deeb, Philip Issa, Nataliya Vasilyeva, Jamey Keaten, Edith Lederer, Zeina Karam, Albert Aji, Josh Lederman and staff members of The Associated Press; by Liz Sly of The Washington Post; and by Ben Hubbard, Anne Barnard, Hwaida Saad, Maher Samaan and Nick Cumming-Bruce of The New York Times.
A Section on 07/29/2016