A United Nations envoy halted his attempts to launch Syrian peace talks on Wednesday after the army, backed by Russian air strikes, made a major advance against rebel forces north of Aleppo, choking opposition supply lines from Turkey to the city. In what rebels called a punishing assault, the government forces ended a three and a half year siege of the Shia towns of Nubul and al-Zahraa, a key step in a wider campaign to recapture all of Aleppo, Syria's biggest city before the war.
The government's territorial breakthrough came after hundreds of bombing raids by Russian warplanes. The UN 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. UN envoy 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. He had formally opened them on Friday but both sides denied they had ever begun.
"I have indicated from the first day that I won't talk for the sake of talking," the envoy told reporters, saying he needed immediate help from international backers led by the United States and Russia, which are supporting opposite sides of a war that has also drawn in regional powers. Aleppo 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 has described this attempt to negotiate an end to a war that has killed 250,000 people, driven millions from their homes and empowered Islamic State, as Syria's last hope. "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," he said after meeting the opposition delegation led by newly-arrived co-ordinator Riad Hijab, who diplomats say is a unifying figure for the disparate rebel side.
NO END TO RUSSIAN STRIKES Aleppo, 50 km 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 insurgent's hopes of toppling President Bashar al-Assad after nearly five years of bloody conflict that has seen a de facto partition 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.
"How can you ... enter negotiations when you have unprecedented military pressure?" a senior Western diplomat said. "The Russians and regime want to push the opposition out of Geneva so the opposition bears the responsibility for the failure." Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said his country had no intention of ending its campaign. "Russian strikes will not cease until we really defeat terrorist organisations like (The al Qaeda-linked) Jabhat al-Nusra. And I don't see why these air strikes should be stopped," he said at a news conference in Oman's capital Muscat.
Diplomats and opposition members said they were taken by surprise when de Mistura called for immediate efforts to begin cease-fire 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.
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