Russia said on Thursday it would stop attacks on Aleppo for 48 hours next week to allow delivery of humanitarian aid, indicating it would also prevent the Syrian government from bombing there, provided the United States could guarantee a similar pause by the “so-called moderate opposition.”
Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov said that Russia’s other “condition” for implementing the temporary cease-fire was that separate routes would be established for U.N. convoys to bring aid to rebel-controlled eastern Aleppo and to the western side held by the government.
President Obama’s administration, which has been pushing for a more widespread cease-fire, said it would not “turn up our nose” at the 48-hour offer.
But “we really believe it’s important to get beyond temporary, ephemeral and localized cease-fires,” State Department spokesman John Kirby said.
News of a possible pause in the fighting came as the world was arrested by a video of a small boy, covered with blood and dust, pulled by rescue workers from the rubble of a building in Aleppo bombed by Russian or Syrian aircraft.
Medical workers identified the boy as Omran Daqneesh, 5, and said he was only one of a number of children rescued on Wednesday. His parents were later said to have survived the attack.
Dazed and expressionless, barefoot and dressed in dirty shorts and a cartoon-character T-shirt, Omran is seen reaching up his hand to his blood-covered face. Seemingly in slow motion, he looks at his hand and then wipes it on the orange leather of his seat in an ambulance as he stares into the distance.
The video spread quickly on social media, much as last year’s image of a dead Syrian toddler, the son of a family fleeing by boat to Europe, whose body washed up on a Turkish beach.
“By my figuring, that little boy has never had a day in his life where there hasn’t been war, death, destruction, poverty in his own country,” Kirby said of Omran. “You don’t have to be a dad, but I am. You can’t but help look at that and see that that’s the real face of what’s going on in Syria.”
Earlier on Thursday, Staffan de Mistura, the U.N. envoy to the Syria crisis, said he had suspended meetings of an international task force working on humanitarian issues in Geneva because “there was no sense in having a humanitarian meeting today unless we got some action.”
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, most of them surrounded by government forces.
But Aleppo, once Syria’s largest city, has brought the crisis to a new level of desperation. In recent weeks, intense Russian and Syrian bombing closed the only access road from Turkey, in the north, to an estimated quarter-million people on the rebel-controlled eastern side. Early this month, opposition forces broke through government encirclement of the city in the south to threaten government-held western Aleppo, where up to 2 million civilians live.
The United States and Russia, which head a separate international task force trying to implement a cease-fire, have been negotiating for months as the carnage has increased.
In a statement issued after news of the Russian announcement of what Konashenkov called a “pilot program” for possible weekly 48-hour truces, the United Nations said it was ready to begin food and medical deliveries immediately, once security could be guaranteed.
The statement said the United Nations “counts on Russia to deliver its part, regarding, in particular, the adherence of the Syrian armed forces to the pause, once it comes into effect,” and on the United States “to ensure that the armed opposition also respects the 48-hour humanitarian pause.”
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The Washington Post’s Carol Morello contributed to this report.
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