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Islamic State faces major assaults on two fronts in Iraq, Syria

Iraqi security forces and Shi'ite fighters fire artillery towards Islamic State

By Maher Nazeh and Phil Stewart

SOUTHERN OUTSKIRTS OF FALLUJA, Iraq/WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Islamic State insurgents faced major assaults on two fronts in both Iraq and Syria on Wednesday in what could prove to be some of the biggest operations to roll back their caliphate since they proclaimed it in 2014.

In Syria, U.S.-backed militia with thousands of Arab and Kurdish fighters were reported to have captured villages near the strategically-important Turkish border after launching a major operation to cut off Islamic State’s last access route to the outside world.

In Iraq, Prime Minister Haider Abadi ordered his troops to slow an advance at the gates of Falluja, Islamic State’s closest redoubt to the capital Baghdad, to limit harm to civilians, two days after the army poured into rural areas on the city’s outskirts.

Both operations are unfolding with the support of a U.S.-led coalition that has been targeting the ultra-hardline Sunni Muslim militants, who proclaimed a caliphate to rule over all Muslims from territory in the two neighboring countries.

The Syrian operation includes American special forces operating in advisory roles on the ground. In Iraq, the U.S.-led coalition has provided air support to government forces who are also assisted by Iranian-backed Shi’ite militia.

While there is no indication that the two advances were deliberately timed to coincide, they show how a variety of enemies of Islamic State have been mobilizing in recent months in what Washington and other world powers hope will be a decisive year of battle to destroy the group’s pseudo-state.

“LAST FUNNEL”

The Syrian operation, which began on Tuesday after weeks of preparations, aims to drive Islamic State from the last stretch of the frontier with Turkey it controls.

“It’s significant in that it’s their last remaining funnel” to Europe, a U.S. military official told Reuters. Islamic State has used the border for years to receive material and recruits from the outside world, and, more recently, to send militants back to Europe to carry out attacks.

An 80-km stretch of terrain north of the town of Manbij is the only part of the Turkish frontier still accessible to the militants after advances by Kurdish fighters and President Bashar al-Assad’s government elsewhere.

A small number of U.S. special operations forces will support the push on the ground to capture the “Manbij pocket”, acting as advisers some distance back from the front lines, U.S. officials said, discussing the plans on condition of anonymity.

“They’ll be as close as they need to be for the (Syrian fighters) to complete the operation. But they will not engage in direct combat,” the first official said.

The operation will also count on air power from the U.S.-led coalition, which pounded Islamic State positions near Manbij with 18 strikes on Tuesday.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a group that reports on the conflict there with a network of sources on the ground, said Islamic State had been pushed out of 16 villages near Manbij. U.S.-led air strikes in support of the ground operation had killed 15 civilians including three children near Manbij in the last 24 hours, the Observatory said.

The assault is being carried out by an alliance known as the Syria Democratic Forces (SDF), which is composed of a powerful Kurdish militia called the YPG, and Arab combatants that have allied themselves with it.

The group, set up last year, is the main ground force to receive U.S. backing in Syria, where Washington opposes Assad’s government and has had difficulty finding capable allies on the ground in the past.

U.S. officials stressed that most of the fighting near Manbij would be carried out by Arabs, an emphasis apparently aimed at Turkey, which considers the Kurdish YPG to be foes.

“After they take Manbij, the agreement is the YPG will not be staying … So you’ll have Syrian Arabs occupying traditional Syrian Arab land,” the first U.S. official said.

However, the Observatory described much of the fighting so far as carried out by Kurds.

The operation is taking place ahead of an eventual push by the U.S.-backed Syrian forces toward Raqqa, Islamic State’s de facto Syrian capital, which, alongside Iraq’s northern city of Mosul is one of two main objectives to bring down the caliphate.

U.S. President Barack Obama has authorized about 300 U.S. special operations forces to operate on the ground inside Syria to help coordinate with local forces. In a reminder of the risks, one U.S. service member was injured north of Raqqa over the weekend, the Pentagon said.

A five-year-long, multi-sided civil war in Syria, in which global powers back enemy sides, has made it impossible to coordinate a single campaign against Islamic State there.

The U.S.-backed advance comes some weeks after Assad government troops, with Russian and Iranian support, recaptured the ancient city of Palmyra from Islamic State.

FALLUJA PAUSE

In Iraq, where Abadi’s Shi’ite-led government enjoys military backing both from the United States and Washington’s regional adversary Iran, the decision to pause at the gates of Falluja postpones for now what is expected to be one of the biggest battles ever fought against Islamic State.

“It would have been possible to end the battle quickly if protecting civilians wasn’t among our priorities,” Abadi told military commanders at the operations room near the front line in footage broadcast on state television. “Thank God, our units are at the outskirts of Falluja and victory is within reach.”

Falluja has been a bastion of the Sunni Muslim insurgency against both the Shi’ite-led Baghdad government and U.S. troops, who fought the biggest battles of their 2003-2011 occupation there. Islamic State fighters, also known as ISIS, ISIL or Daesh, raised their flag in the city in 2014 before sweeping through Iraq’s north and west.

Abadi first announced plans to assault Falluja 10 days ago. But with 50,000 civilians still believed trapped inside the city, the United Nations has warned that militants are holding hundreds of families in the center as human shields.

After heavy resistance from Islamic State, the troops have not moved over the past 48 hours, keeping positions in Falluja’s mainly rural southern suburb of Naimiya, according to a Reuters TV crew reporting from the area.

Explosions from shelling and air strikes as well as heavy gunfire could be heard on Wednesday morning in the city that lies 50 km (30 miles) west of Baghdad.

Falluja is the second-largest Iraqi city still under control of the Sunni militants after Mosul. Abadi’s initial decision to assault Falluja seems to have gone against the plans of his U.S. allies, who would prefer the government concentrate on Mosul.

“You do not need Falluja in order to get Mosul,” a spokesman for a U.S.-led anti-IS coalition, U.S. Army Colonel Steve Warren, said in a phone interview 10 days ago when the government first announced its plans to recapture Falluja.

However, Falluja is Islamic State’s closest bastion to Baghdad and is believed to be the base from which militants have staged a campaign of suicide bombings in the capital, increasing pressure on Abadi to act to improve security.

FLEEING CIVILIANS SCREENED

Although most of Falluja’s population is believed to have fled during six months of siege, 50,000 people are still thought to be trapped inside with little food.

“The city is inaccessible for assistance and market distribution systems remain offline,” the United Nations’ World Food Programme said. “The only food available does not come from the markets, but from the stocks that some families still have in their homes.”

The military has been detaining men and boys older than 12 who leave the city, to screen them for Islamic State fighters.

“Don’t treat us like we are Daesh,” said 54-year-old Mahdi Fayyadh, among hundreds of families who escaped the city and were now taking shelter in a school.

Fayyadh, who lost a leg to diabetes while under Islamic State’s rule due to a lack of medication, said he fled the city with 11 family members after the assault began. Relatives helped him walk on crutches until they reached army lines, when the other men in the group were taken away.

“I already lost a leg,” Fayyadh said, a battered pair of crutches leaning against his shoulder. “I ask all the good people to not treat us like they (the militants) treated us.”

U.S. officials caution that territorial gains will not spell the end of Islamic State, which has established itself outside of its self-declared caliphate in Iraq and Syria, spreading to Libya, Afghanistan and beyond.

“It would be premature to say that the gains in Syria, even if they’re sustained, will spell defeat for ISIL, any more than the pummeling of al Qaeda in Pakistan has meant the end of that group,” said one of the U.S. officials.

(Additional reporting by John Davison in Beirut, Maher Chmaytelli and Ahmed Rasheed in Baghdad; Writing by Peter Graff; Editing by Mark Heinrich)

NATO likely to designate cyber as operational domain of war

A NATO flag flies at the Alliance headquarters in Brussels during a NATO ambassadors meeting on the situation in Ukraine and the Crimea region

BERLIN (Reuters) – NATO members will likely agree during a summit meeting in Warsaw next month to designate cyber as an official operational domain of warfare, along with air, sea, land and space, a senior German defense ministry official said Wednesday.

Major General Ludwig Leinhos, who heads the German military’s effort to build up a separate cyber command, told a conference at the Berlin air show that he expected all 28 NATO members to agree to the change during the coming Warsaw summit.

Leinhos, who previously held a senior job at NATO headquarters, said he also expected NATO members to agree to intensify their efforts in the cyber security arena.

The United States announced in 2011 that it viewed cyberspace as an operational domain of war, and said it would respond to hostile attacks in cyberspace as it would to any other threat.

Evert Dudok, a senior official with Europe’s largest aerospace company Airbus Group SE, called for adoption of Europe-wide or global standards in the cyber arena.

(Reporting by Andrea Shalal)

U.S. allies target Islamic State in Falluja

File photo of Iraqi soldiers firing a rocket toward Islamic State militants on the outskirt of the Makhmour south of Mosul

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The United States and its allies said they targeted Islamic State on Wednesday with two dozen strikes in Iraq, including four near Falluja, where Iraqi forces have launched a recent effort to retake the city from the militant group.

The strikes in the city west of Baghdad hit three Islamic State tactical units and two tunnels used by the group as well as four vehicles, an artillery piece, a weapons cache and three fighting positions, the coalition leading the operations said in a statement released on Thursday.

Other strikes included five near Mosul, another city where Iraqi forces, with support from the coalition, are working to retake control in the country’s northern region. Targets near the cities of Habbaniya, Haditha, Hit, Qayyara, Sinjar, Sultan Abdalla and Tal Afar, the Combined Joint Task Force said.

Separately, in Syria, five U.S.-led strikes near four cities also hit five Islamic state fighting units, among other targets, it said.

(Reporting by Washington newsroom Editing by W Simon)

Nearly 1000 killed in attacks on health workers in 2014-15

Candles are pictured outside the Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland

By Stephanie Nebehay

GENEVA (Reuters) – Nearly 1,000 people were killed in attacks on health centers worldwide over the past two years, almost 40 percent of them in Syria, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Thursday in its first report on the growing scourge.

The United Nations agency documented 594 attacks resulting in 959 deaths and 1,561 injuries in 19 countries with emergencies between January 2014 and December 2015.

Syria, torn by civil war since 2011, had the most attacks on hospitals, ambulances, patients and medical workers, accounting for 352 deaths. The Palestinian territories of Gaza and the West Bank, as well as Iraq, Pakistan and Libya, followed.

Some 62 percent of all attacks were deemed intentional and many led to disruption of public health services.

“This is not an isolated issue, it is not limited to war zones, it is not accidental. The majority of these are intentional,” Dr. Bruce Aylward, executive director of WHO’s emergency program, told a news briefing.

“It is also not stopping and it has real complications for what we are trying to do. It is getting more and more difficult to deploy people into these places, it is getting more and more difficult to keep them safe when they are there and it is getting more and more difficult to ensure they survive, let alone recover in crises.”

The casualty figures include 42 killed and 37 wounded in a U.S. air strike on a Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders) hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan last October.

A U.S. military report last month said that the incident did not amount to a war crime but was caused by human error, equipment failure and other factors, but MSF has called for an independent inquiry.

WHO said 53 percent of the attacks were perpetrated by states, 30 by armed groups and 17 percent remain unknown.

“One of the most important rules of war you is that you don’t attack health care facilities, health care providers, the sick, the disabled. So these attacks do represent gross violations of international humanitarian law,” said Rick Brennan, WHO director of emergency risk management and humanitarian response.

“Violations of international humanitarian law, if proven, can be considered war crimes and the perpetrators can be taken to the International Criminal Court,” he said.

(Reporting by Stephanie Nebehay; Editing by Mark Heinrich)

Islamist militants exploit chaos as combatants pursue peace in Yemen

Followers of Houthi movement

By Mohammed Ghobari and Noah Browning

CAIRO/DUBAI (Reuters) – Islamic State efforts to exploit chaos may have brought Saudi-backed forces and Iran-allied Houthis tentatively closer at peace talks in Yemen’s civil war, but a deal seems unlikely in time to avert collapse into armed, feuding statelets.

Ferocious conflict along Yemen’s northern border between Saudi Arabia and Iran-allied Ansurallah, a Shi’ite Muslim revival movement also called the Houthis, defied two previous attempts to seal a peace. But a truce this year and prisoner exchanges mean hopes for a third round of talks are higher.

The threat from an emerging common enemy may be galvanizing their efforts. Islamic State appears to be behind a dizzying uptick in suicide attacks and al Qaeda fighters continue to hold sway over broad swathes of the country that abuts Saudi Arabia, the world’s biggest oil exporter.

Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir said on Thursday the kingdom sought to prioritize fighting militants in Yemen over its desultory arm-wrestle with entrenched Houthi insurgents.

“Whether we agree or disagree with them, the Houthis are part of the social fabric of Yemen … The Houthis are our neighbors. Al Qaeda and Daesh are terrorist entities that must be confronted in Yemen and everywhere else,” Jubeir tweeted, using the Arabic acronym for Islamic State.

Now largely stalemated, the conflict has killed at least 6,200 people – half of them civilians – and sent nearly three million people fleeing for safety.

Despite the relative lull during talks, hostility continues. Saudi Arabia has pounded its enemies with dozens of air strikes. Houthis have responded with two ballistic missile launches.

If the parties seize the opportunity, an unlikely new status quo may reign by which Houthis and Saudis depend on each other for peace.

“This could mean a massive re-ordering of Yemen’s political structure, and the conflict so far has already produced some strange bedfellows,” said Adam Baron, a visiting fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations.

The Houthis ousted the internationally recognized government in 2014 in what it hailed as a revolution but which Sunni Gulf Arab countries decried as a coup benefiting Shi’ite rival Iran.

Pounding the Houthis and their allies in Yemen’s army with air strikes beginning on March of 2015, a Saudi-led alliance soon deployed ground troops and rolled back their enemies toward Sanaa, held by the Houthis.

A near-blockade imposed by the Saudi-led coalition and frontlines which ebb and flow across villages and towns have deprived nearly 20 of 25 million people of access to clean water and put yet more in need of some form of humanitarian aid.

“SURRENDER”

Of the countries where pro-democracy “Arab Spring” uprisings in 2011 ultimately led to outright combat, Yemen’s United Nations-sponsored peace process arguably shows the most promise.

Unlike with Libya and Syria, representatives of Yemen’s warring sides meet daily in Kuwait and argue over how to implement U.N. Security Council resolutions and share power.

But while keeping Yemen’s parties talking for this long was an accomplishment, getting them to live together in Sanaa and share power remains a distant dream.

Yemeni Foreign Minister Abdel-Malek al-Mekhlafi accused the Houthis of resisting a U.N. Security Council Resolution from last April to disarm and vacate main cities.

“There is a wide gap in the debate, we are discussing the return of the state … they are thinking only of power and demanding a consensual government,” he told Reuters.

Houthi spokesman Mohammed Abdel-Salam said on his facebook page: “The solution in Yemen must be consensual political dialogue and not imposing diktats or presenting terms of surrender, this is unthinkable.”

But a diplomatic source in Kuwait said that through the fog of rhetoric, a general outline of a resolution has been reached.

“There is an agreement on the withdrawal from the cities and the (Houthi) handover of weapons, forming a government of all parties and preparing for new elections. The dispute now only centers around where to begin,” the source said.

FEUDING STATELETS

All parties will be aware the danger of a collapse into feuding statelets is growing. The Houthis are deepening control over what remains of the shattered state it seized with the capital in 2014.

Footage of the graduation ceremony of an elite police unit last week showed recruits with right arms upraised in an erect salute, barking allegiance not just to Yemen but to Imam Ali and the slain founder of the Houthi movement – a move critics say proves their partisan agenda for the country.

Meanwhile the Houthis’ enemies in the restive, once independent South agitate ever more confidently for self-rule.

Militiamen in Aden last week expelled on the back of trucks more than 800 northerners they said lacked proper IDs and posed a security risk.

The tranquility amid the gardens and burbling fountains of the Kuwaiti emir’s palace hosting the talks have not impressed residents of Yemen’s bombed-out cities, who despair whether armed groups can ever be reined in.

“All the military movements on the ground suggest the war will resume and that both parties are continuing to mobilize their fighters on the front lines,” said Fuad al-Ramada, a 50-year old bureaucrat in the capital Sanaa.

(Writing By Noah Browning; editing by Ralph Boulton)

Russia tops agenda for White House visit by Nordic leaders

President Obama and Nordic Leaders

By Roberta Rampton

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The leaders of Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Norway and Iceland will be treated to the pomp of a White House state visit on Friday, a summit where Russia’s military aggression will top the agenda.

President Barack Obama will welcome the leaders for talks focused on pressing global security issues, including the crisis in Syria and Iraq that has led to a flood to migrants in Europe.

Moscow’s annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea region in 2014 alarmed Russia’s Nordic and Baltic neighbors. With NATO considering ways to try to deter further Russian aggression, the White House wants to show support for its northern European allies.

“It is a way of sending a signal that the United States is deeply engaged when it comes to the security of the region, and we will be actively discussing what steps we can collectively take to improve the situation,” said Charles Kupchan, Obama’s senior director for European affairs.

Kupchan declined comment on specific measures the White House hopes to emerge from the summit.

Obama will be limited in what he can promise by the political calendar, given that his second and final term ends next year on Jan. 20. Americans are set to hold presidential elections on Nov. 8.

The visit will culminate in a star-studded state dinner in a tent with a transparent ceiling, with lighting, flowers and ice sculptures evoking the northern lights.

Pop star Demi Lovato, known for her support of liberal causes, will perform after guests enjoy a main course of ahi tuna, tomato tartare, and red wine braised beef short ribs.

Obama is expected to laud the humanitarian and environmental accomplishments of his guest nations, who have been key supporters of an international deal to curb climate change that the White House sees as a key part of Obama’s legacy.

“The president has often said, ‘Why can’t all countries be like the Nordic countries?'” Kupchan said.

(Reporting by Roberta Rampton)

People uprooted within states by conflict hits record in 2015

Children ride on the back of a truck loaded with water jerrycans at a camp for internally displaced people in the Dhanah area of the

By Megan Rowling

BARCELONA (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – The number of people uprooted inside their own countries by war and violence hit a record 40.8 million in 2015, with Yemen recording the most cases of newly displaced, an international aid group said on Wednesday.

Globally there were 8.6 million fresh cases of people fleeing conflict last year within borders, an average of 24,000 a day, the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) said in a report. More than half of those were in the Middle East.

Some 2.2 million people in Yemen, or 8 percent of its population, were newly displaced in 2015, largely the result of Saudi-led air strikes and an economic blockade imposed on civilians, the report said.

IDMC said the number of people forced from their homes by conflict but staying in their own countries was twice those who have become refugees by crossing international borders.

“The world is in a tremendous displacement crisis that is relentlessly building year after year, and now too many places have the perfect storm of conflict and/or disasters,” said Jan Egeland, secretary general of the Norwegian Refugee Council, which runs IDMC.

“We have to find ways to protect people from these horrendous forces of both nature and the man-made ones.”

The U.N. refugee agency has said the number of people forcibly displaced worldwide was likely to have “far surpassed” a record 60 million in 2015, including 20 million refugees, driven by the Syrian war and other drawn-out conflicts.

The IDMC report said displacement in the Middle East and North Africa had “snowballed” since the Arab Spring uprisings that began in 2010 and the rise of the Islamic State militant group, which is waging war in Syria, Iraq and elsewhere.

“What has really led to the spike we have seen most recently has been the attack on civilians – indiscriminate bombing and air strikes, across Syria but also Yemen,” said Alexandra Bilak, IDMC’s interim director. “People have nowhere to go.”

DISASTER PREVENTION

Globally, there were 19.2 million new cases of people forced from their homes by natural disasters in 2015, the vast majority of them due to extreme weather such as storms and floods, IDMC said.

In Nepal alone, earthquakes in April and May uprooted 2.6 million people.

Egeland said many countries, such as Cuba, Vietnam and Bangladesh, had improved their record on preventing and preparing for natural disasters.

“But in Asia I would say, and to some extent Latin America, still too little is done to meet the growing strength of the forces of nature fueled by climate change,” he added.

The former U.N. aid chief urged this month’s World Humanitarian Summit in Istanbul to focus on building resilience to natural disasters, and finding ways to avert conflicts and protect civilians in war.

IDMC’s Bilak said political action was needed to stop more people being forced from their homes, and staying displaced for long periods.

“The numbers are increasing every year, which clearly shows that the solutions to displacement are not being found,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Colombia, Democratic Republic of Congo, Iraq, Sudan and South Sudan have featured in the list of the 10 largest displaced populations every year since 2003, the report noted.

“People are not returning, they are not locally integrating where they have found refuge, and they are certainly not being resettled somewhere else,” Bilak said.

(Reporting by Megan Rowling; Additional reporting by Stine Jacobsen in Oslo; Editing by Katie Nguyen. Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women’s rights, trafficking, corruption and climate change. Visit http://news.trust.org)

Syrian military deny targeting camps, U.N condemns ‘murderous attacks’

People walk though burned tents at a camp for internally displaced people near

BEIRUT/GENEVA (Reuters) – The Syrian military denied it had conducted air strikes on camps near the Turkish border on Thursday which killed at least 28 people, but the U.N. human rights chief said initial reports suggested a government plane was responsible.

The death toll from attack on the camp for internally displaced people near the town of Sarmada included women and children, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said, and could rise further because many people were seriously wounded.

“There is no truth to reports … about the Syrian air force targeting a camp for the displaced in the Idlib countryside”, the Syrian military said in a statement on Friday carried by state media.

U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad al Hussein said the attacks were almost certainly a deliberate war crime.

“Given these tent settlements have been in these locations for several weeks, and can be clearly viewed from the air, it is extremely unlikely that these murderous attacks were an accident,” Zeid said in a statement.

“My staff, along with other organizations, will leave no stone unturned in their efforts to research and record evidence of what appears to be a particularly despicable and calculated crime against an extremely vulnerable group of people,” he said.

“Initial reports suggest the attacks were carried out by Syrian Government aircraft, but this remains to be verified.”

Footage shared on social media showed rescue workers putting out fires which still burned among charred tent frames, pitched in a muddy field. White smoke billowed from smoldering ashes, and a burned and bloodied torso could be seen.

Sarmada lies about 30 km (20 miles) west of Aleppo, where a cessation of hostilities brokered by Russia and the United States had brought a measure of relief on Thursday.

Zeid said most of the people in the camps had been forced to flee their homes in Aleppo in February because of sustained aerial attacks there.

He said he was also alarmed about the situation in Syria’s Hama central prison, where detainees had taken control of a section of the prison and were holding some guards hostage.

“Heavily armed security forces are surrounding the prison and we fear that a possibly lethal assault is imminent. Hundreds of lives are at stake, and I call on the authorities to resort to mediation, or other alternatives to force,” Zeid said.

He urged governments on the U.N. Security Council to refer Syria to the International Criminal Court so that there is “a clear path to punishment for those who commit crimes like these”.

(Reporting by John Davison in Beirut and Tom Miles in Geneva; Editing by Gareth Jones and Dominic Evans)

Rebels bombard Aleppo killing 19 and hitting a hospital

A Syrian army soldier helps to evacuate civilians after rockets fired by insurgents hit the al-Dabit maternity clinic in government-held parts of Aleppo city

BEIRUT (Reuters) – Rebels bombarded government-held areas of Aleppo with rockets on Tuesday, killing 19 people and hitting a hospital, while also launching a ground assault on army-held positions of the divided city, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

The Syrian army said insurgents had launched a widespread assault and that it was responding. State-run Syrian news channel Ikhbariya said three women were killed and 17 more people wounded at the al-Dabit maternity clinic.

The army statement said the attack was at “a time when international and local efforts are being made to shore up the (cessation of hostilities agreement) and to implement … calm in Aleppo”.

The Observatory said the hospital had been heavily damaged.

In rebel-held parts of Aleppo, the Observatory said there had been three air strikes, citing information of an unconfirmed number of people killed.

The Observatory said 279 civilians have been killed in Aleppo by bombardments since April 22, with 155 of them killed in opposition-held areas, and 124 killed in government-held districts.

The ground assault focused on the Jamiat al-Zahraa area of the city, where insurgent groups detonated tunnels and took a few buildings before advances were checked by the arrival of reinforcements on the government side, the Observatory said.

A Syrian army source said a car bomb was used in an attack nearby, adding that the assault had failed. The source added that “matters had been moving toward Aleppo being included in the truce, but it seems there are those who do not want that”.

Asked if it reduced the chances of a truce in Aleppo, the source said: “Certainly, because practically the one carrying out these actions does not want a truce”.

(Reporting by Lisa Barrington and Tom Perry, editing by Richard Balmforth)

Aleppo Death toll mounts; rescue workers killed

Residents and civil defence members inspect a damaged building after an airstrike on the rebel-held Tariq al-Bab neighbourhood of Aleppo

BEIRUT (Reuters) – Attacks by government forces and rebels killed at least 30 people, including eight children, in the last 24 hours in Aleppo, a city seeing some of the worst of a renewed escalation in the Syrian war, a monitoring group said.

Intensified fighting has all but destroyed a partial ceasefire that started at the end of February, with U.N.-led peace talks in disarray.

In Aleppo, divided between areas controlled by the government and by rebels, 19 people were killed by rebel shelling and 11 were killed by government air strikes, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

That adds to another 60 people killed over the weekend in Aleppo, Syria’s largest city before the war, according to the Observatory. Air strikes were also reported in rebel-held areas near Damascus and in Hama province on Tuesday.

In a separate incident west of Aleppo, five Civil Defence workers – first responders in opposition-held territory where medical infrastructure has all but broken down – were killed by air strikes and a rocket attack on their centre.

The Observatory and Civil Defence colleagues said the attack appeared to have deliberately targeted the rescue workers in the town of Atareb, some 25 km (15 miles) west of Aleppo.

“The targeting was very precise,” Radi Saad, a Civil Defence worker, told Reuters.

“They were in the centre and ready to respond. When they heard warplanes in the area they did not think they would be the target.” Two people were seriously wounded and ambulances and cars belonging to doctors were destroyed, another Civil Defence member, Ahmad Sheikho, said.

It was unclear whether Syrian or Russian warplanes had launched the raids. There was no immediate comment from the Syrian government.

Each side accuses the other of targeting civilian areas in the five-year-old war that has killed more than 250,000 people.

A Syrian military source said the army would “respond firmly” against rebels attacking government-held parts of Aleppo. State news agency SANA said what it called terrorist groups, including the al Qaeda-affiliated Nusra Front, had shelled those neighborhoods.

In the north of Aleppo, insurgents resumed bombardment of a Kurdish-controlled neighborhood, Sheikh Maqsoud, according to the Kurdish YPG militia.

“Civilian areas were shelled at random,” the YPG said.

The YPG and its allies have been battling rebels, including groups backed via Turkey by states opposed to President Bashar al-Assad, for several months near Aleppo and close to the Turkish border.

Rebels accuse the YPG of collaborating with the government in trying to stop people using the only road into opposition-held Aleppo, something the YPG denies.

Turkey sees the YPG as a terrorist group and is concerned at moves by Kurdish forces to expand their control along the Syrian-Turkish border, where they already hold an uninterrupted 400 km (250 mile) stretch.

(Reporting by John Davison; additional reporting by Tom Perry and Marwan Makdesi in Damascus; Editing by Robin Pomeroy)