The battle for the devastated city of Aleppo — once Syria’s commercial heart — is intensifying, and video has surfaced appearing to show thousands of civilians streaming out of the area.
The authenticity of the video could not be independently verified by CNN.
But reports say that forces loyal to the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, crucially aided by Russian air power, have cut the city off from supplies and are advancing. Aleppo, once a bustling city of more than 2 million people, has been reduced to rubble by Syria’s 5-year civil war.
It has been bombed and besieged for 3 years. Entire neighborhoods have been devastated to the point where they are uninhabitable.
A sense of panic among those fleeing
One of the most important trading cities in the Middle East throughout history, Aleppo has historically been a city to which people flocked when they were looking for work.
But the latest video appears to show a sense of panic among the thousands of people streaming out of the northern outskirts of the city, fleeing for their lives — bound, most probably, for the Turkish border, 60 miles (97 kilometers) to the north.
And from there, they will push onward, perhaps, to Europe, which is experiencing one of the most significant waves of migration in recent decades.
A United Nations official, citing U.N. estimates made for emergency relief planning, told CNN that 321,000 civilians are thought to be in a rebel-held area east of Aleppo.
Families are fleeing what could be one of the worst fights yet in Syria’s extraordinarily brutal civil war, a battle that has been brewing ominously now for days.
“Now, 10,000 new refugees are waiting in front of the door of Kilis because of air bombardments and attacks against Aleppo,” Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said Thursday in London. “Sixty to seventy thousand people in the camps in north Aleppo are moving towards Turkey. My mind is not now in London, but in our border — how to relocate these new people coming from Syria? Three hundred thousand Aleppo people, living in Aleppo, are ready to move towards Turkey.”
Kilis is a city across the border in Turkey.
Aleppo is home to many moderate opponents of Assad. But it is the more radical al-Nusra Front that is now issuing the call to arms inside the devastated city.
And the government has managed to cut the rebels’ main supply route, which lies east of the city. That could isolate hundreds of thousands of civilians.
And it is also keeping aid from getting into the city.
Innocent civilians ‘running for their lives’
The intensified fighting and airstrikes have cut off the main humanitarian route into the city, according to the global organization Mercy Corps.
Just since Wednesday, the organization’s operations in northern Syria have effectively been cut in half, the group said in a statement
“We are cut off from Aleppo City,” said David Evans, Mercy Corps’ regional program director for the Middle East. “It feels like a siege of Aleppo is about to begin.”
The civil war has left many civilians inside the country reliant on humanitarian assistance. With one of the largest food delivery operations in north Syria, Mercy Corps has been reaching up to 500,000 people per month.
“Innocent civilians are running for their lives,” Evans said. “Right now, we are seeing tens of thousands of people make their way to the border with Turkey.”
