Brother of boy in iconic Syrian photo killed in airstrike

The battle for Syria’s second city has killed 333 civilians since July 31, when rebels launched a major push to break a government siege of districts under their control, the monitoring group said.

The fighting has frustrated the UN’s efforts to fulfil its humanitarian mandate, and the world body’s special envoy to Syria cut short a meeting Thursday of the ad hoc committee – chaired by Russian Federation and the U.S. – tasked with deescalating the violence so that relief can reach beleaguered civilians.

On Wednesday three more people added to the dead list and 12 others joined the wounded list as per their UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

Trapped civilians are enduring hunger, power cutoffs and airstrikes by Russian-backed government forces, and medical care is harder and harder to come by; in the city’s opposition-held areas, at least two dozen medical facilities have been hit, according to United Nations investigators.

Last week, 15 Syrian doctors still working in rebel-held Aleppo wrote a letter to President Obama telling him about four newborn babies who they said were “suffocated to death after a blast cut the oxygen supply to their incubators”. It is now divided into rebel-held and government-held areas.

The United Nations has said that the level of fighting in August has prevented aid from reaching any of the 18 besieged areas and cities in Syria, a lot of them surrounded by government forces.

In Geneva, U.N. envoy Staffan de Mistura cut short the weekly meeting of the humanitarian task force headed by the United States and Russian Federation, in protest at the failure of warring parties to allow aid to reach civilians. The message should be: “in the West we should talk to end the war in Syria”, Kurdi said in an interview Thursday.

The United States is trying to avoid being drawn deeper into this conflict.

“Not one single convoy in one month has reached any of the humanitarian besieged areas – not one single convoy”, de Mistura, who chairs the task force, told reporters.

Russian defence ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov later announced that Moscow was “ready to implement the first 48-hour “humanitarian pause” to deliver humanitarian aid to Aleppo residents” next week.

This week, maybe the face of a small boy, silent and sad-eyed in a hellish landscape, will provoke more people to look more deeply into Syria, and themselves.

Using survivors’ accounts, the Amnesty report details the harrowing conditions for inmates and the brutal methods of torture including rape, sexual violence, flogging, burning and scalding. And the story of who Omran Daqneesh is will probably keep people up at night. Roughly 1 in 4 refugees in the world today, nearly five million people, are Syrian. “But in Syria they wake up to constant nightmares”.

At just five years old, he’s as old as the conflict itself.

“This is like an infected wound in world politics”, Eliasson said.