World Bulletin / News Desk
Fifty-six people were killed today with a total death toll of four days of attacks standing at 323, with figures set to rise and 220 injured Saturday by Assad regime and Russian airstrikes on residential areas in opposition-held parts of Syria’s northwestern city of Aleppo, a civil defense official said.
Speaking to Anadolu Agency, Najib Ansari said that the warplanes targeted the districts of Bustan al-Qasr, Mashhad, al-Kallasa, Salihiya, and al-Fardos, all currently under siege by the Bashar al-Assad regime.
The casualties include women and children.
The death toll is expected to rise due to limited capacity to rescue victims trapped under collapsed buildings.
On Friday, 86 people were killed by regime and Russian warplanes.
Aleppo has been recently suffered from intense attacks by regime and Russian forces.
Since Sept. 19, at least 323 civilians have been killed and 1,334 injured by Assad regime and Russian airstrikes on Aleppo, according to civil defense officials and medical sources in the city.
The attacks have targeted districts in the eastern part of Aleppo besieged by regime forces.
Syria has been locked in a devastating civil war since 2011, when the Assad regime cracked down on pro-democracy protests – which had erupted as part of the Arab Spring uprisings – with unexpected ferocity.
The Syrian Center for Policy Research, a Beirut-based NGO, has put the death toll from the six-year-old conflict at more than 470,000.
No running water
One attack, on a town west of Aleppo city called Bashqateen, killed 15 members of a family who had been sheltering in a residential building housing internally displaced people, activists said.
As the bombing entered a second day, three medical facilities and two centres belonging to the White Helmets, a volunteer rescue group, were hit in airstrikes that disabled some of their vehicles, cut off roads in the city and left victims trapped in collapsed buildings. The White Helmets said more than 40 buildings were destroyed.
The new government attacks have come as the U.N. said that nearly 2 million people in Aleppo, Syria's largest city and onetime commercial center, are without running water following the escalation of the fighting in recent days after the truce collapse.
According to a report by the Associated Press,
Hanaa Singer, UNICEF representative in Syria, said intense attacks damaged the Bab al-Nairab station, which supplies water to some 250,000 people in the rebel-held east.
Singer said that in retaliation, the Suleiman al-Halabi pumping station, also located in the rebel-held east, was switched off — cutting water to 1.5 million people in government-held western parts of the city.
"Depriving children of water puts them at risk of catastrophic outbreaks of water-borne diseases," Singer warned in her statement, released late Friday.
Güncelleme Tarihi: 24 Eylül 2016, 17:38
