Foreign-backed militants have fired rockets at a humanitarian corridor established by Syria and Russia in Aleppo, wounding two Russian troops and a Syrian journalist.
The Russian Defense Ministry said the shelling targeted the western part of the key Castello Road in Aleppo during a unilateral humanitarian ceasefire on Friday.
The 10-hour-long truce took effect at 0700 GMT on Friday, the second such temporary truce announced in the city by Russia and Syria.
The corridor attacked by the militants was one of a total of eight passageways established to allow civilians and militants not affiliated to terrorist groups to leave Aleppo’s militant-held east.
The journalist wounded in the Friday shelling worked for the Syrian state TV.
The ministry said that around 50 representatives of Russian, Western and Arab media had to be evacuated from the area and online monitoring of the humanitarian corridor had to be temporarily suspended because of the shelling.
Syria’s state news agency (SANA) said the militants sought to prevent civilians from leaving by shelling the corridor, the second time they did so in the past month.
One Aleppo resident who managed to leave said people inside were being prevented from leaving the city by the terrorist groups of Ahrar al-Sham and Jabhat Fateh al-Sham, formerly known as Nusra Front.
Meanwhile, Fadi Ismail, an official in Syria’s Reconciliation Ministry who is based in Aleppo, said 250,000 civilians had been trapped in the militant-held areas of Aleppo.
Moscow said on Thursday that Russia and Syria were giving the ceasefire another try in an attempt to “prevent senseless casualties.”
Foreign-backed militants, however, have ignored the gesture and last week they used the pause to launch one of their most ferocious offensives in order to break an army siege on eastern Aleppo.
The so-called Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said Thursday that rocket fire on the government-held districts of Aleppo in the west had killed at least 15 people, bringing the civilian toll in the area in recent days to 70.
Staffan de Mistura, the United Nations special envoy for Syria, has said the militants had intentionally killed scores of civilians in the west of the city.
The Syrian army launched operations to reunite the government-held western part and the eastern section of Aleppo on September 22.
‘Turkish military hits targets in Syria’
In a separate development, the Turkish army said in a statement on Saturday that it had hit targets inside Syria over the past 24 hours.
The statement claimed that Turkish army forces had targeted 71 positions belonging to the Takfiri Daesh terrorist group in northern Syria, killing five of them.
At least five Turkish-backed militants as well as a soldier were also killed, the army said, without elaborating.
The statement further said that another eight Daesh militants were killed when the US-led coalition targeted their position in the area.
Turkey has been hitting targets in northern Syria in the recent past without permission from the government in Damascus. Turkey has also been pounding targets in Iraq, also without authorization from the central government in Baghdad.
The targets of the Turkish military in the two countries are mostly Kurdish fighters. Ankara, however, claims to be targeting Daesh, too, as in the latest strikes.
On August 24, Turkish special forces, tanks, and jets backed by planes from the US-led coalition launched their first coordinated offensive in Syria. Damascus quickly denounced the intervention as a breach of Syrian sovereignty.
Turkey said the incursion was meant to engage the Daesh Takfiri terrorists in the Syrian-Turkish border area as well as Kurdish fighters, who were themselves fighting Daesh.
Turkey stands accused of supporting some of the militants fighting against the government in Syria.
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