How much longer can east Aleppo hold out?
With hospitals destroyed, winter weather setting in and food running low, people in east Aleppo are running out of time.
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| Aleppo War |
Hamza Abduljabbar's gnarled hands wipe the dust off the dashboard of his white Isuzu minibus.
Back hunched from decades sitting behind the wheel, Abduljabbar still wakes up each morning at 6am to check on his vehicle - the windows of which have long since been blown out by nearby air strikes - when his rounds of east Aleppo's Fardous neighbourhood would normally have begun.
"Everything is dusty these days. The bombing never stops," he says. "Anyway, there's no fuel, so the car just sits here." Five years of war and five months of siege have aged the 45-year-old father of three well beyond his years. He hasn't worked in months.
Government forces, backed by Russian air power and allied militias, began a new push last week to take control of the whole of Syria's second city, the latest offensive in the uprising-turned-war that has killed more than 400,000 people and forced nearly five million Syrians out of the country in search of safety.
The renewed bombing campaign has killed more than 400 civilians and allowed the government to take over the strategic Hanano housing district - which could effectively enable government troops to split the rebel-held east in two.
"The rebels have failed to break the siege and are losing territory, and the international community has failed to send in supplies or aid," said Abduljabbar. "My family and I are surviving day to day here under the barrel bombs and the planes. There’s nowhere else to go."
The situation in the besieged, rebel-held neighbourhoods of east Aleppo has "gone from terrible to terrifying to now barely survivable by human beings", UN humanitarian chief Stephen O'Brien told the UN Security Council during his monthly briefing earlier this week.
Food rations pre-positioned in the city by the World Food Programme before UN access was cut off in July ran out on November 13, and aid workers have said that people in the city's east are "just days" away from starvation.
Source: Aljazeera news
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