People shop on the first day of Ramadan at the Karaj Al Hajez crossing, a passageway separating Aleppo’s Bustan Al Qasr, which is under rebels’ control, and Al Masharqa neighbourhood, an area controlled by the regime, yesterday.
BEIRUT: Syrian rebels fired into the air to disperse a protest by civilians in a rebel-held district of Aleppo against a blockade preventing food and medicine reaching government-held areas of the northern city, residents said yesterday.
Rebel fighters have stopped supplies entering western parts of Aleppo for weeks. The tactic is aimed at weakening the supply routes of President Bashar Al Assad’s forces but thousands of civilians are now going hungry, residents say.
Video footage posted on the Internet on Tuesday showed dozens of civilians in the rebel-held neighbourhood of Bustan Al Qasr protesting at a rebel checkpoint which prevents supplies from entering the western section of the city, home to 2 million people and held by the army.
Although insurgents and the army control different parts of the country, civilians are normally allowed to cross freely to shop or meet family members and friends.
The footage, posted by the opposition Bustan Al Qasr Information Office, showed men at the protest chanting, “the people want an end to the blockade.” A rebel fighter brandishes a pistol and then a gunshot is heard as the video ends.
An opposition activist group called the Aleppo Martyrs said rebels fired at the protesters, killing one person and wounding several others. But a resident at the protest said the man was killed prior to the protest by army sniper fire as he tried the cross between rebel and government-held territory.
Rebels who now control many parts of the country are blamed for similar abuses by rights groups, including torture and harsh punishments imposed by religious courts.
Humanitarian aid organisations say their shipments have been blocked by both rebels and the army in many parts of Syria. “We are facing challenges delivering assistance throughout the country, especially in contested areas,” Jane Howard, a United Nations World Food Programme spokeswoman, said.
Howard said that WFP has tried eight times since October 2012 to deliver aid to Moadamiyeh, a suburb of Damascus that has been pummelled by air strikes and artillery. Although the area is only 5km from the WFP warehouse, Howard says convoys were “either turned back, did not get approval or came under fire.”
In Aleppo, the WFP has delivered rations to more than 250,000 people in the weeks leading up to Ramadan. “We have our fingers crossed that if Aleppo goes through a particularly difficult period, we’ve managed to get enough food into the city to tide people over for the next month,” she said. At the rebel checkpoint in the Aleppo neighbourhood of Bustan Al Qasr, a sign displayed by rebels read: “Food, medicine, oil, babies’ products, milk, vegetables, meat, bread: completely forbidden (from crossing).”
Residents in western Aleppo say food prices have jumped to more than ten times their original level and basics such as bread and flour have become harder to find.
Civilians say they are stockpiling food, such as bulgur wheat and rice, which are still available. They say some vegetables are still being sold in markets.
Meanwhile, the mainstream rebel Free Syrian Army accused Moscow of lying, when it said it had evidence that rebel fighters had used sarin nerve gas in an attack. The FSA “confirms that the Russian report on the revolutionaries’ use of sarin gas is false and fabricated”, the rebels’ political and media coordinator Louay Muqdad said. He said the rebels do not have such weaponry and charged that Moscow was “trying to cover for the regime” of Assad.
The statement came after Russia’s envoy to the United Nations said experts from his country had been to the scene of an attack at Khan Al Assal near Aleppo in March and gathered firsthand evidence. The United States rejected the Russian claims.
Agencies
