While peacemakers talk, Aleppo’s children pay the price of Syria’s war

While the Great Powers were talking peace in gilded conference halls, Syria’s children were nursing their wounds.

The wards of a clinic on the country’s border with Turkey were full of victims of the latest upsurge of fighting around the embattled city of Aleppo – Syria’s Stalingrad. The United States and Russia may have agreed a ceasefire: but there was little sign of it here.

In the wards lay victims of all the war’s participants: of the regime, of Russian jets, of Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil), of Kurdish militias – even of Turkish border police.

That line-up of assailants shows how beleaguered the rebel-held enclaves in Aleppo and the northern countryside stretching to the Turkish border have become. This is the territory of the “moderate rebels” – the 70,000 fighters David Cameron thought could be turned into an army to fight Isil, but are now being crushed, with no-one to help them, by overwhelming assaults from all sides.

Among those on the wards were Afaf, a 13-year-old girl. Her body was gashed and pitted with shrapnel, but her grandmother calls her “the lucky one” – her brothers’ skulls are fractured, her parents are both in intensive care, and all are close to death.

She was hit by a Russian air strike, as was nearby Fouad Asil, a 24-year old who had lost both legs.

Fouad Asil, 24, recuperates in the International Blue Crescent clinic in Kilis, Turkey  Photo: Sam Tarling/The TelegraphThen there was the teenage boy looking after his younger brother, lying in pain with smashed legs hit by a regime missile as he tried to flee into rebel-held land from the Isil-held town of al-Bab, north-east of Aleppo.

“We thought it was hell in that place,” he said, declining to give their names out of fear for the safety of family members still living under Isil rule.

“Life was terrifying for all of us, but it was my little brother who suffered the most. He loved to learn and they just wouldn’t let him.”

In another ward lay Shaimaa, a five-year-old with one eye missing altogether and the other one also destroyed. Her 12-year-old brother was dead.

It was the Kurdish YPG militia who killed him and blinded her, spraying the minibus in which the family were trying to escape Aleppo with a hail of bullets. The militia were trying to cut a rebel supply line.

“She never saw her country in peacetime and now she’ll never see anything again,” her father, Mahmoud, said. “May God watch over her, she’s the only one we have left.”

And then, the final insult, there was the man shot by the Turkish border police for trying to escape his country’s disaster.

After a traumatic journey from regime-held Homs, George, 35, was caught and beaten by Turkish border guards.

After sending him back into the war he had just left, he said the men shot him in the back of the leg. “I was 15 metres away,” he said.

Last week, border guards also shot a 12-year-old girl as her family fled the fighting. Her body was carried back for burial in the blanket she had carried to stay warm at night.

It sounds like a paradox that these injuries coincided with peace talks in Geneva earlier this month and then the ceasefire deal concluded after a late-night negotiation on Thursday between John Kerry, the US secretary of state, and his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov (L) and US Secretary of States John Kerry meet in Munich on Thursday  Photo: AFP/GettyIn fact, the terms of the deal illustrate exactly how Aleppo got into this state, its rebel defenders besieged from the south by the regime, the east by Isil, and the west by the Kurds, who are trying to set up an autonomous homeland and have found common cause with the regime against the rebels.

Because the rebels are backed by the West, their ability to fight has been constrained by America’s determination to try anything for peace: weapons supplies have been predicated on their willingness to abide by the norms of war, and to put forward negotiating teams to seek a deal.

The regime, with its unconditional backing from both Russia and Iran, and determination to use all means necessary, has been able to roll back the rebels, squeezing them into a small space south of the Turkish border.

The ceasefire deal was almost universally mocked the moment it was declared – the moderate rebels were in fact the only group that had to lay down its weapons under its terms. “Terrorists” like Isil and Jabhat al-Nusra, the local al-Qaeda branch, were specifically excluded, along with anyone fighting them, which all the other participants say they are doing.

Even Mr Lavrov said yesterday that the ceasefire was less than likely to work. “Forty-nine per cent,” he replied when asked what chances he gave it.

New assessments last week concluded that as it approaches its fifth anniversary next month, the war has killed 470,000 people, and injured a further 1.9 million – the total comprising 11 per cent of the country’s pre-war population.

Nevertheless, President Bashar al-Assad said in an interview released on Friday that he intended to fight on to retake the whole country – ceasefire talks or no ceasefire talks.

A US government spokesman called him “deluded”, but Russian bombing continued yesterday and Syrian state television said the army and its allied militias had seized the village of al-Tamura, in the hills north-west of Aleppo, further squeezing the rebel pocket.

Syrian children wait to return to their country at the Turkish border crossing with Syria in the outskirts of Kilis  Photo: APNo-one is immune from the Russian jets, which have proved decisive and deadly to everyone trapped in Aleppo province, including 300,000 in rebel-held parts of the city itself.

“After the Russian intervention, the level of destruction changed completely,” said Essam, a member of the White Helmets, the nationwide, British-trained association of rescue workers that has been built up by civilian opposition councils in the last two years. “There are entire villages and suburbs empty because of the strikes.”

Essam, 31, was wounded last week when a Russian strike hit a civilian home, a second strike then hitting metres away from the rescue team. “My colleagues had to dig me out of the rubble,” said Essam. “The people next to me were dead.”

Essam, 43, a ‘White Helmet’ civil defence worker recuperates in the International Blue Crescent clinic in Kilis, Turkey  Photo: Sam Tarling/The TelegraphGiven the likely failure of both the ceasefire and the next round of Geneva peace talks, due to start on February 25, the question is what the rebels’ western and Gulf backers will do next.

Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain all pledged ground troops last week to the fight against Isil, and the Turkish foreign minister said yesterday that Saudi officers had visited the Incirlik air base in south-eastern Turkey with a view to preparing to send jets.

That would be regarded as a hostile act by Mr Assad. He – almost certainly rightly – sees the real purpose of the Saudi intervention as ensuring that if US bombing does defeat Isil, Raqqa, Deir Ezzour and the other areas it holds do not return to regime rule.

In truth, the landscape of the war may change but the reality of it is unlikely to be altered any time soon. Neither Russia, with its strikes across the country, nor the US and Britain, with their bombing of Isil territory, indicated they would be lessen the pace or attacks, while the rebels still have plenty of weapons.

There will be more victims like Afaf’s family, who were just washing up after dinner when the jets came.

“It happened at night,” she said. “I ran outside and I couldn’t even get the words out before the airstrike hit.

“Suddenly there was a rocket, and then my house was gone. I spent two days under the rubble.

“I have so many worries for my family.There is something I have learned in this war – it is that my life does not matter to anyone but my parents. And my parents are in intensive care.

“We just want to let go of these feelings but we are prisoners. I wish you could see what they are doing to the children. They are killing them.”