Donald Trump Jr. in October attended a roundtable conference on ending the Syrian civil war that was hosted by a French think tank favoring closer cooperation with Russia and Syrian President Bashar Assad, The Wall Street Journal's Jay Solomon reported on Wednesday.

The conference, held at the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Paris, centered on urging the US and Russia to "reach accord on the issue of the Syrian crisis,"according to Randa Kassis, a leader of a Syrian opposition group and wife of the think tank's founder. The countries' cooperation is more likely under President-elect Donald Trump, Kassis wrote on Facebook earlier this month.

Kassis apparently told the state-sponsored Russian news agency Sputnik earlier this month that "Trump's team had realized that it was impossible to reach an agreement between Moscow and Washington" if the US continued to consider Russia an enemy.

Trump Jr.'s presence at the meeting was not reported by Sputnik, but Kassis wrote in the Facebook post that she "succeeded to pass Trump, through the talks with his son, the idea of how we can cooperate together to reach the agreement between Russia and the United States on Syria."

Trump Jr.'s attendance at a roundtable meeting with pro-Russian, Syrian-opposition elements was confirmed by Kellyanne Conway, one of Trump's senior advisers.

"Don was addressing a roundtable in Paris, and [Kassis] was present for that talk and at a group dinner for 30 people," Conway told The Journal. "This event featured a number of opinion leaders from all over the world who were interested in the US elections."

Donald Trump has often argued that the US should work more closely with Russia and its ally, Assad, to defeat ISIS in Syria.

"I don't like Assad at all, but Assad is killing ISIS," Trump said in October during the second presidential debate.

And in an interview with The Journal earlier this month, he indicated that he could pull back US support to Syrian rebels fighting the Assad regime, saying "we have no idea" who the rebels really are.

Assad, for his part, said in an interview last week that he considers Trump to be "a natural ally" in the fight against terrorism.

Assad and his Russian and Iranian allies do not distinguish between non-Islamist rebel groups and jihadist organizations such as ISIS and former Al Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al Nusra, however.

Dozens of Syrian civilians have been killed in the past week by Russian airstrikes on rebel-held eastern Aleppo in a renewed offensive after a three-week halt to the air campaign.

They are the kind of attacks that led US Secretary of State John Kerry to suspend negotiations with Russia over Syria's future last month, weeks after Russia launched a scorched-earth offensive on Aleppo that targeted hospitals, schools, and rescue workers. Both France and the US have called for a war-crimes investigation into Russian President Vladimir Putin's and Assad's actions in Syria.

Russia has picked out members of the opposition who it would be willing to work with, but these include only rebel figures willing to accept a role for Assad in a political transition — a condition deemed unacceptable by many, if not most, of Syria's opposition fighters.

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Turkey said it would retaliate after three of its soldiers were killed in what the military said was a suspected Syrian air strike, the first such deaths at the hands of Syrian government forces since Ankara launched a cross-border incursion in August.

The attack occurred at around 3:30 am on Thursday during a Turkish-backed Syrian rebel operation in northern Syria, the Turkish military said in a statement.

It said 10 other soldiers were wounded in the air strike that it "assessed to have been carried out by Syrian regime forces". It gave no details on the exact location.

"It is clear that some people are not happy with this battle Turkey has been fighting against Daesh (Islamic State). This attack will surely have a retaliation," Prime Minister Binali Yildirim told reporters in the capital Ankara.

Direct confrontation between NATO-member Turkey and Syrian government forces, which are backed by allies including Russia, would mark a serious escalation in an already messy battlefield in northern Syria.

Turkey is part of the U.S.-led coalition against Islamic State, but Washington has said it is not providing support for the three-month-old Turkish offensive in Syria as it moves toward the Islamic State-held city of al-Bab.

There was no immediate comment from the Syrian military. But it said in October the presence of Turkish troops on Syrian soil was a "flagrant breach of Syria's sovereignty" and warned it would bring down Turkish warplanes entering its air space.

Security and hospital sources in Turkey earlier blamed Islamic State fighters for the attack and said it was in the al-Bab region. The wounded soldiers were transferred to hospitals in the Turkish border provinces of Kilis and Gaziantep, they said. 

Warning from Assad allies

Turkey sent tanks, special forces and jets into Syria on Aug. 24 in support of largely Turkmen and Arab rebels in an offensive dubbed "Euphrates Shield" meant to push Islamic State and Kurdish militia fighters from its border.

President Tayyip Erdogan said last week that the Turkish-backed rebels were close to taking the Syrian city of al-Bab, the last urban stronghold of Islamic State in the northern Aleppo countryside.

Forces allied to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad warned Turkey last month against making any advance toward their positions to the north and east of Aleppo, saying any such move would be met "decisively and with force".

The Turkish-backed rebels have clashed with Syrian government forces before, including in late October, when a suspected Syrian government helicopter bombed their positions near Dabiq, a former Islamic State stronghold.

But the overnight clash was the first time the Turkish military has said its own soldiers were killed by Syrian forces since Euphrates Shield began.

The attack came on the first anniversary of Turkey shooting down a Russian warplane over Syria, which prompted a lengthy diplomatic rift between Moscow and Ankara which only ended in August. Moscow is a major military backer of Assad.

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A US service member died on Thursday after being wounded in an improvised explosive device blast in northern Syria, U.S. Central Command, or CENTCOM, said in a statement.

CENTCOM said the blast occurred in the vicinity of Ayn Issa, but gave no other details, adding it would release more information "as appropriate."

US Defense Secretary Ash Carter expressed condolences in a statement, saying he was "deeply saddened" that the soldier was killed "protecting us from the evil of ISIL.

"It is a painful reminder of the dangers our men and women in uniform face around the world to keep us safe," he said.

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BEIRUT (Reuters) - The Lebanese army detained an Islamic State leader and 11 other militants in a dawn raid on Friday near the town of Arsal on the Syrian border, security sources said.

Ahmad Yousef Amoun, the Islamic State leader, was wounded in a shootout during the raid. The army seized a large quantity of weapons and explosive belts, the sources said.

The town of Arsal was the location of a major attack by jihadists from Islamic State and the al Qaeda-linked Nusra Front in 2014. Islamic State is still holding nine Lebanese soldiers kidnapped by the group during the attack.

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Aleppo (Syria) (AFP) - The Syrian army advanced in Aleppo on Friday, pounding the rebel-held east with strikes that killed dozens and added to the despair for more than 250,000 civilians under siege.

The US military meanwhile announced its first combat loss in Syria, saying a service member had been killed by a bomb during an offensive against the Islamic State group.

Ten days into the Syrian government's renewed bid to recapture all of battered second city Aleppo, regime bombardment has killed nearly 190 civilians and left residents desperate for respite.

The regime is hoping to score its most important victory yet of the five-year civil war, dealing a potentially decisive blow to the rebels by recapturing eastern neighborhoods they overran in 2012.

Civilians in the east have been under siege by the army since July, with food and fuel supplies dwindling and international aid completely exhausted.

On Thursday alone, 32 civilians were killed in air strikes and artillery fire on eastern neighborhoods, among them five children, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

"I'm terrified by the army's advance and the increasing bombardment," said Abu Raed, a father-of-four living in Fardos neighborhood.

"There's no safe place for me and my family."

Rescuers pull boy from rubble

The Observatory said the army now controlled more than 60 percent of the strategic Masaken Hanano district and was pushing on.

Masaken Hanano is east Aleppo's largest district and its capture would cut the rebel-held sector in two.

The advances have been accompanied by relentless air and artillery bombardment, with medical staff in the east accusing the army of dropping barrel bombs filled with chlorine gas.

Damascus and its ally Moscow have repeatedly denied any illegal, military use of the chemical.

Retaliatory rocket fire by the rebels has killed at least 18 civilians in the government-held west, 10 of them children, according to the Observatory.

On Thursday night, rescue workers in several parts of the east battled to extricate civilians trapped under the rubble of bombed buildings.

In Bab al-Nayrab, an AFP cameraman saw rescuers battle for more than an hour to pull out a seriously wounded boy.

The lower part of his body was trapped and the back of his head badly gashed.

He cried out "father, father," as the rescuers used pickaxes to break up the concrete surrounding him.

The desperate conditions have prompted some civilians to flee.

In recent days, five families have crossed to Sheikh Maqsud, a Kurdish-controlled enclave between the government-held west and rebel-held east, the Observatory said.

Damascus says residents and surrendering fighters are free to leave, and accuses the rebels of preventing civilians from doing so and using them as "human shields."

'Unbearable circumstances'

On the ground, residents expressed despair.

"Living under these circumstances is unbearable," said 43-year-old Mohammed Haj Hussein, in Tariq al-Bab district.

"There's no work, there's no food, and the bombing is incessant... I want to get out of here by any means possible."

In Bab al-Nayrab district, Abu Hussein said: "I don't know what the UN is waiting for. Why don't they at least evacuate the children and women?"

The UN says it has a plan to deliver aid to Aleppo and evacuate the sick and wounded, which rebel factions have approved.

But Damascus has yet to agree, and additional guarantees are needed from Moscow, UN officials say.

On Thursday, the head of the UN-backed humanitarian taskforce for Syria, Jan Egeland, warned there was no plan B to help civilians in east Aleppo.

"In many ways plan B is that people starve, and can we allow that to happen? No we cannot," he said.

Further east, in Raqa province, where a US-backed alliance of Kurdish and Arab fighters is battling IS, Washington suffered its first combat loss in Syria, the US-led coalition announced.

It said the service member died on Thursday from wounds caused by an improvised bomb near the town of Ayn Issa.

US special forces are on the ground in the area supporting an offensive to retake the city of Raqa, the jihadists' de facto Syrian capital.

The death came as Americans celebrated the Thanksgiving holiday. 

SEE ALSO: Turkey promises retaliation after suspected Syrian airstrike kills 3 of their soldiers, wounds 10 more

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ERBIL, Iraq (Reuters) - A medic peeled blood-soaked bandages from the arm of a boy in the emergency room of a hospital in northern Iraq, revealing the full extent of the damage inflicted by an Islamic State mortar attack.

"Is something wrong with my hand?" the boy asked his father, who stood over the stretcher covering his son's eyes to prevent him seeing the wound.

"It's nothing, just a small wound," replied the father, Abu Nidal, as the medic inspected the mangled remains of the boy's hand, maimed beyond repair.

Around them were dozens of other civilians who have been wounded in areas of Mosul since they were retaken from Islamic State by Iraqi forces trying to dislodge the militants from their largest urban stronghold in Iraq.

The civilians say are not accidental victims caught in the crossfire and that Islamic State has been targeting them.

"In any area liberated by the army, Daesh (Islamic State)considers us apostates, so it is permissible to kill us," said the boy's father, who asked not to be identified.

His son had insisted on accompanying him to buy flour at a market in the Zahra neighborhood of Mosul when a mortar bomb hit them, nearly three weeks after Iraqi forces entered the district.

As Iraqi forces edge forward in Mosul's eastern districts, taking pains to avoid harming civilians, Islamic State mortar and sniper fire is hitting the people it ruled harshly for more than two years. 

With more than 100,000 men backed by an international coalition arrayed against an estimated 5,000 to 6,000 insurgents inside the city, there is little doubt Iraqi forces will eventually prevail. The question is at what cost.

Price of freedom

An average of 100 casualties are arriving each day at the hospital in the Kurdish regional capital Erbil, where those with wounds too serious to be treated at field clinics on Mosul's outskirts are rushed, a hospital administrator said.

In the burns unit, a 28-year old woman lay wrapped in bandages, only part of her face showing. Ten days after the army retook her neighborhood, she was making bread when her stove was knocked over during a mortar attack and she was set ablaze.

"They (Islamic State) harmed us after the liberation," she said in a weak voice.

About 70,000 of Mosul's estimated population of 1 million have fled to camps in the surrounding area, according to U.N. figures, but the majority have remained in their homes.

"We decided to stay because my mother and father are ill and it's hard to live in a camp," said 42-year old Abu Abd al-Rahman. That decision cost him a leg, he said, folding back a blanket to show a stump below the knee.

"May God take revenge on them," he said.

Despite the growing number of casualties, the wounded praised the conduct of the Iraqi security forces and said it was a price worth paying to be free again from Islamic State.

"We are happy to be liberated, but Daesh spoiled it," said 38-year-old Abu Ahmed, a blanket covering a leg wound after he was shot by a sniper. "They have no mercy".

Across the corridor was Ziyad Younis, who buried his elder brother en route to the hospital. He is now tending to a nephew wounded in a mortar attack as he had breakfast.

"Our one hope was to be liberated; we didn't expect it to be like this," he said.

(Editing by Patrick Markey and Timothy Heritage)

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The inhabitants of besieged eastern Aleppo have fewer than 10 days to receive aid or face starvation and death from a lack of medical supplies, according to the head of the Syria Civil Defence, or White Helmets.

The volunteer group, which works in opposition-held territory and has rescued thousands of people from buildings bombed in the civil war, is also running out of basic equipment from lorries to diesel and gas masks.

"You cannot imagine how the situation is," Raed al-Saleh told Reuters news agency.

Saleh was in Stockholm to receive the Right Livelihood Award, known as Sweden's Alternative Nobel Prize.

"Doctors and the rescue workers in Aleppo are just using what's left of the equipment after bombardments to do whatever they can do," Saleh said.

Anti-government fighters in the eastern part of Aleppo city have agreed to a United Nations plan for aid delivery and medical evacuations, but the UN is awaiting a green light from Russia and the Syrian government, Jan Egeland, the UN humanitarian adviser, said on Thursday.

Freezing winter conditions

With freezing winter conditions setting in, about 275,000 people are trapped in eastern Aleppo, where the last UN food rations were distributed on November 13.

Saleh said doctors were so short of supplies that they were resorting to making life and death decisions over who receives surgery.

"They cannot accept everyone ... There are not enough materials and not enough doctors," he said.

Saleh said the White Helmets had lost 50 percent of their equipment in the past two months.

"We have consumed all the stock of first aid kits in our centres and we have consumed all our stock of gas masks,"he said.

"We are concerned that within 10 days we may consume all our remaining stock of diesel which is required for the ambulances and the trucks to move."

There has been, heavy, continuous and violent shelling on neighborhoods in eastern Aleppo in the last 10 days.

Al Jazeera's Amro Halabi, reporting from Aleppo's Thahrat Awad neighbourhood, said: "Here, a parachute bomb containing toxic material was dropped. It caused multiple cases of asphyxiation among civilians.

"A variety of weapons were used for the shelling including parachute bombs, bombs containing toxic material and barrel bombs that have taken the lives of dozens of civilians.

"The shelling continues in what is the most violent spell of bombing the besieged city has experienced."

The White Helments' Saleh said his workers had responded to approximately 10 chlorine attacks in Aleppo over the past 10 days, the last being on Wednesday.

Rami Abdulrahman, director of the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which monitors the Syrian conflict, said the observatory had documented two incidents of chlorine attacks in the past fortnight.

Banned toxic agents

On November 11, the executive body of the global chemical weapons watchdog the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) condemned the alleged use of banned toxic agents by the Syrian government and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) group.

A 13-month international inquiry by the OPCW and UN concluded in a series of reports that Syrian government forces were responsible for the use of chlorine barrel bombs against civilians.

Syrian authorities deny having used chemical weapons in the conflict.

ISIL, also known as ISIS, has not commented.

Saleh also criticised Russia, which is backing Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in the conflict.

"I believe the withdrawal of Russia from the International Criminal Court is because it knows it commits war crimes in Syria and it doesn't want to be accountable," he said.

The White Helmets shared the Right Livelihood award this year with Mozn Hassan, the Egyptian feminist and human rights activist, Russia's Svetlana Gannushkina, who campaigns for the rights of migrants and refugees, and the Turkish newspaper Cumhuriyet.

The four laureates share a cash award of three million Swedish crowns ($325,000).

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Aleppo (Syria) (AFP) - Hundreds of civilians have fled rebel-held east Aleppo after government forces, determined to retake all of Syria's second city, seized its largest opposition-controlled district.

The capture on Saturday of Masaken Hanano -- which had been the biggest rebel-held district of Aleppo -- was a major breakthrough in a 13-day regime offensive to retake the entire city.

The fighting moved to two neighboring districts, Haidariya and Sakhur, on Sunday, with regime aircraft pounding rebel positions and heavy fighting between the opposition and forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad.

Masaken Hanano was the first district the rebels took in the summer of 2012 in a move that divided the city into a rebel-held east and a regime-controlled west.

Around 250,000 civilians trapped under government siege for months in the east have faced serious food and fuel shortages.

More than 500 civilians fled rebel-held districts for the government-controlled west overnight, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group said on Sunday.

The civilians fled to Masaken Hanano after it fell under government control and were taken by the army to regime-held areas, the Observatory said.

"It is the first exodus of this kind from east Aleppo since 2012," Observatory chief Rami Abdel Rahman said.

'Aircraft destroying everything'

Yasser al-Youssef, from the rebel group Nureddin al-Zinki, said on Sunday that opposition fighters were consolidating their positions in Sakhur.

"We are strengthening our positions to defend the city and residents, but the aircraft are destroying everything methodically, area by area," he said, referring to a regime campaign of air strikes on the city.

Sakhur lies on a stretch of just 1.5 kilometres (less than a mile) between west Aleppo and Masaken Hanano, now both controlled by the regime. 

If the regime did manage to take control of the district, east Aleppo would be split in two from north to south, dealing a further blow to the armed opposition.

Pro-government media reported government forces continued their advance on Sunday.

The latest regime push comes after days of intense bombardment on the east, which has been pounded with air strikes, shells and barrel bombs.

On Saturday, dozens of families fled Sakhur and Haidariya as regime raids and artillery fire killed at least 18 civilians in several districts, the Britain-based Observatory said.

That took to 219 the overall number of civilians killed, including 27 children, since the government launched its latest assault on east Aleppo on November 15.

IS chemical attack

Rebel forces also intensified rocket attacks on western districts overnight, killing at least four civilians and wounding dozens, the Observatory said.

Such attacks have killed a total of 27 civilians since the offensive began, among them 11 children.

The United Nations has a plan to deliver aid to Aleppo and evacuate the sick and wounded, which rebel factions have approved but which Damascus has not yet agreed. Guarantees are also needed from regime ally Russia.

Once a commercial and industrial hub, Aleppo has seen some of the worst fighting in Syria's five-and-a-half-year war.

The conflict broke out in 2011 with the brutal repression of anti-government protests and has since evolved into a complex war involving different factions and foreign powers.

On Sunday, the Turkish army said that 22 pro-Ankara Syrian rebels were hit by a chemical gas attack from Islamic State group jihadists in northern Syria.

The Turkish army is backing the Syrian fighters in an unprecedented cross-border operation it says is targeting both IS and the Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG) militia, which it considers to be a "terrorist" group.

The YPG is a key component of a US-backed Arab-Kurdish alliance that is fighting to oust IS from its de facto Syria capital of Raqa, after the jihadist group overran large parts of Syria and Iraq in 2014.

Syria's war has killed more than 300,000 people and displaced more than half the population.

SEE ALSO: This is what Aleppo is

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BEIRUT (Reuters) - The Syrian army and its allies announced the capture of a swathe of eastern Aleppo from rebels on Monday in an accelerating attack that threatens to crush the opposition in its most important urban stronghold.

Rebels denied that the army had taken the strategically vital Sakhour area which - if it fell - would mean rebel-held territory in the eastern part of the city was split in two.

But the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the government had taken Sakhour, and rebels had lost control of more than a third of eastern Aleppo in recent days.

Thousands of residents were reported to have fled. A rebel fighter reached by Reuters said there was "extreme, extreme, extreme pressure" on the insurgents there.

Capturing eastern Aleppo would be the biggest victory for President Bashar al-Assad since the start of the uprising against him in 2011, giving him control of the whole city.

For Assad, taking back Aleppo would shore up his grip over the main urban centers of western Syria where he and his allies have focused their firepower even as much of the rest of the country has slipped from their grip.

It would also be seen as a victory for his allies, Russia and Iran, which have outmaneuvered the West and Assad's regional enemies through direct military intervention.

With military backing from the Russian air force, Iran, and Lebanon's Hezbollah, Assad has gradually closed in on eastern Aleppo this year.

Citing a military source, Syrian state TV said the army and its allies had seized the entire Sakhour area and were working to clear it of mines. Backed by allied militiamen, the army has been advancing into eastern Aleppo from the northeast in recent days, and made significant gains over the weekend.

A military news service run by Hezbollah declared the northern portion of eastern Aleppo was now under government control. Observatory director Rami Abdulrahman called it the biggest defeat for the opposition in Aleppo since 2012.

Kurdish militia

Abdulrahman said part of the area had been seized by the Kurdish YPG militia, which is hostile to the rebels in eastern Aleppo and had advanced into the rebel-held territory from the Kurdish-controlled Sheikh Maqsoud district.

Damascus and its allies have steadily closed in on rebel-held eastern Aleppo this year, first cutting off the most direct route to nearby Turkey before encircling it from the west and then beginning a fierce assault in September.

While some of the rebels in Aleppo have received support from states such as Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United States during the war, they say their foreign backers have failed them as Assad and his allies unleash enormous firepower.

"There is great, great pressure on the fighters in Aleppo and there is very ferocious shelling and heavy attrition of people and ammunition," said the rebel fighter. "God willing the fighters will hold on and be able to resist the regime."

The fighting has forced thousands of residents of eastern Aleppo to flee. Some have gone to the Kurdish-held Sheikh Maqsoud district, others have gone over to government territory, and others have moved deeper into remaining rebel-held areas.

Mohammad Sandeh, a member of the opposition city council of Aleppo, told Reuters that many people were on the move but staying in the remaining rebel-held parts of Aleppo.

"The bombardment is still heavy. There's big displacement from the eastern neighborhoods. They are going towards the areas that are somewhat further (from the front lines)," he said.

"There's fear that the regime will advance more."

Saleh Muslim, joint head of the Syrian Kurdish PYD party, told Reuters that between 6,000 to 10,000 people had fled to Sheikh Maqsoud, where they were being received.

The Observatory said several thousand more had crossed front lines in other parts of eastern Aleppo and had been taken to government-controlled areas of western Aleppo.

A spokesman for the U.N. refugee agency UNHCR said exact figures for the number of displaced were difficult to gauge.

"But the Syrian Arab Red Crescent on the ground reports that just over 2,000 people have left eastern Aleppo for the government-controlled district of Jibreen," the spokesman said via email.

SEE ALSO: This is what Aleppo is

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Hamza Abduljabbar's gnarled hands wipe the dust off the dashboard of his white Isuzu minibus.

Back hunched from decades sitting behind the wheel, Abduljabbar still wakes up each morning at 6am to check on his vehicle - the windows of which have long since been blown out by nearby air strikes - when his rounds of east Aleppo's Fardous neighbourhood would normally have begun.

"Everything is dusty these days. The bombing never stops," he says. "Anyway, there's no fuel, so the car just sits here." Five years of war and five months of siege have aged the 45-year-old father of three well beyond his years. He hasn't worked in months.

Government forces, backed by Russian air power and allied militias, began a new push last week to take control of the whole of Syria's second city, the latest offensive in the uprising-turned-war that has killed more than 400,000 people and forced nearly five million Syrians out of the country in search of safety.

The renewed bombing campaign has killed more than 200 civilians and allowed the government to take over  the strategic Hanano housing district - which could effectively enable government troops to split the rebel-held east in two.

"The rebels have failed to break the siege and are losing territory, and the international community has failed to send in supplies or aid," said Abduljabbar. "My family and I are surviving day to day here under the barrel bombs and the planes. There’s nowhere else to go."

The situation in besieged, rebel-held neighbourhoods of east Aleppo has "gone from terrible to terrifying to now barely survivable by human beings", UN humanitarian chief Stephen O'Brien told the UN Security Council during his monthly briefing earlier this week.

Food rations pre-positioned in the city by the World Food Programme before UN access was cut off in July ran out on November 13, and aid workers have said that people in the city's east are "just days" away from starvation. 

Food in local markets is scarce and prices have skyrocketed. Fuel and cooking gas are hard to come by in most areas. "There's no flour, no bread. Most of the bakeries have been destroyed and those that still stand are closed because there isn't any supplies," said Samah al-Ahmad.

The 32-year-old mother of four says that the only time she leaves her home in al-Ansari area is to scavenge for basics such as sugar and powdered milk.

Essentials such as salt, which three weeks ago cost 76 cents a kilo, now cost nearly $10 a kilo. The price of one kilo of sugar has jumped to well over $13. Baby formula, nearly impossible to find these days, is about $10 a package. Just three weeks ago the same package cost less than $2. One kilo of meat - a rare commodity - is upwards of $40.

All of the appliances in Samah's home have been piled into a corner. There hasn’t been any electricity for months and everything is done by hand. "The latest bombing has been particularly cruel," said Samah. "There is no safe place here any more."

Samah's husband, injured in an air strike last month, is bedridden. "I can't go to the hospital to get medicine because most have been destroyed … Those that still function lack some of the most basic medicines.”

There are no fully functioning hospitals in east Aleppo. The last operating medical facility was partially destroyed by an air strike on November 19, leaving up to 275,000 people without access to surgery or specialised care.

The 30 doctors who remain in the city operate in underground facilities and are running on low on even the most basic of supplies - including antibiotics, IV fluids and blood bags.

"They are rationing basic supplies … If someone comes in for emergency care after a bombing and [the doctors] fear that more serious patients might soon be arriving, they might hold off on using anesthesia and save it for a patient who is in greater need,” says Elise Baker, a Syria researcher with Physicians for Human Rights.

As supplies continue to dwindle, doctors have reportedly begun using half-doses of antibiotics in some cases in an effort to conserve what little resources they have left.

The government blockade on the city's rebel-controlled eastern neighbourhoods, in place since July, has forced doctors to "cut corners that just shouldn't be cut", says Baker, the effects of which could have lasting implications.

"We've heard anecdotally that people are developing resistance to antibiotics … using half-doses increases antibiotic resistance, which is a problem that will extend well beyond the end of the conflict."

As food and fuel quickly run out and winter weather sets in, Abduljabbar believes its only a matter of time before Aleppo becomes Syria's next Daraya.

"There will be a solution in the regime’s favour and the city will be under the regime’s rule whether the rebels want it or not. But it won’t be easy," he says

"At least in death there will be no worries of warplanes or bombing."

Government forces and members of Lebanon's Hezbollah armed group surrounded and blockaded Daraya, the rebel-held Damascus suburb, for four years until August when, due to increasing pressure on the ground - only one UN aid shipment had been let in since the beginning of the siege - rebel fighters agreed to give up their heavy weapons and be transferred to the opposition-held province of Idlib. 

But while the government and it's allies certainly have the upper hand, according to Sam Heller, Syria analyst and fellow with The Century Foundation, it's not clear what the endgame in east Aleppo will look like just yet. 

"The regime will not accept a partially autonomous opposition zone in half of the city, and so it's pushing for a conclusive victory. But the bussing evacuations that have taken place elsewhere have only been arranged on a much smaller scale, and in areas that were already mostly subdued militarily," says Heller.

The United Nations estimates that there are nearly 8,000 rebel fighters in besieged east Aleppo, 900 of whom are members of Jabhat Fateh al-Sham - the al-Qaeda-affiliated group formerly known as al-Nusra Front. 

"Nothing like this has happened in an area of the size and complexity of east Aleppo, and, with multiple major armed factions inside, it seems unlikely any deal will be coordinated easily or smoothly." 

By the time the Daraya deal took place in August, the suburb's population - once nearly a quarter of a million - was down to 8,000 people. There were only 800 rebel fighters. 

Both the Syrian government and its Russian and Iranian backers understand that waging an assault on an urban area the size of east Aleppo will be a long and bloody battle, according to Yezid Sayigh, a senior associate at the Carnegie Middle East Center. "It took them years to take Daraya," says Sayigh. "East Aleppo is far bigger and far more difficult an area to take."

"They're going to focus on siege tactics to basically engineer a political deal in which the opposition agrees to surrender some of its heavy weapons, while certain categories of fighters are allowed safe passage to other rebel-controlled areas."

With two months to go before US President Barack Obama hands over the reins to President-elect Donald Trump - and even then, there is a high likelihood that Trump's Syria policy will play even more into the hands of Assad and Putin than Obama's - Russia and Assad "aren't pressed for time".

"Why would they take high risks or risk high casualties?" asks Sayigh, if starve-or-surrender policies have already proved successful in places such as Daraya and Moadamiya.  

Humanitarian corridors unilaterally declared open by Russia over the summer saw few people leave Aleppo's besieged east. Damascus and Moscow blamed the rebels for "holding civilians hostage", while rebels and civilians in east Aleppo said the safe routes weren't actually all that safe. 

"If there was a real desire by people to leave, more people would have crossed by now," says Sayigh. "People may still be able to hold out for a while."

Earlier this week, families attempting to escape form east Aleppo via the Kurdish-controlled neighbourhood of Sheikh Maqsoud were forced back by gun fire. 

Whether it is by siege-and-starvation or military might, the loss of east Aleppo will come at a "terrible human cost", according to Heller. But it will also be "a major symbolic defeat for the Syrian opposition".

"A Syrian opposition that had lost its foothold in the country's largest city will become a mostly rural insurgency, contesting Syria’s periphery instead of its main population centres and loci of control. But that’s pretty well where we are anyway. So the question is what's next."

Sitting in her first-storey apartment under a blanket to protect herself from the cold, Samah, frail and anxious, believes that the fall of east Aleppo is only a matter of time. 

"The international community is witnessing massacre after massacre … the rebels are losing neighbourhoods … it's only a matter of time before the regime takes the east," she says.

Whether it is cleaning the house or fetching water from a mosque down the street, she works from the moment she wakes until the moment she goes to sleeps to keep herself from thinking.  She is worn to the bone. She is exhausted. 

"In the meantime though, we'll continue to suffer. It really doesn't matter any more to me [who controls the area] as long as I can get food for my family and have a safe place to live. As long as the fear and the horror end."

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DUBAI (Reuters) - Iran may seek to set up naval bases in Yemen or Syria in the future, the chief of staff of the Iranian armed forces said in remarks published on Sunday.

His comments, likely to be of concern to Shi'ite Iran's Sunni regional rival Saudi Arabia and its allies, raised the prospect of distant footholds perhaps being more valuable militarily to Tehran than nuclear technology.

"We need distant bases, and it may become possible one day to have bases on the shores of Yemen or Syria, or bases on islands or floating (bases)," said General Mohammad Hossein Baqeri, quoted by the Shargh daily newspaper.

"Is having distant bases less than nuclear technology? I say it is worth dozens of times more," added Baqeri, who was speaking at a gathering of naval commanders.

Iran and Saudi Arabia are on opposite sides in Middle East conflicts, with the Iranians a main ally of President Bashar al-Assad in Syria's civil war and of the armed Houthi movement fighting a Saudi-led military coalition in Yemen.

In a rare rebuke for Iran, a Houthi official on Sunday criticized Baqeri's comments and urged Tehran to read about the history of failed attempts to occupy Yemen.

"Not one inch of Yemen's land or waters will be forfeited to any foreign party ... whether a friend or an enemy," said Saleh al-Samad, the Houthis' political council chief in a statement on Facebook. 

(Reporting by Dubai newsroom; Editing by Andrew Bolton)

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A Twitter account claiming to belong to a seven-year-old girl, Bana Alabed, and her mother, Fatemah, has been tweeting live updates from Aleppo, the epicenter of Syria's brutal civil war. 

The account, first created in September 2016, shows the harrowing reality civilians in Aleppo face daily. The account has already racked up a substantial 145,000 followers on the social media platform.

On Sunday, Bana tweeted that the house she was staying in was bombed and that she witnessed people dying as a result. 

In another tweet posted on Saturday, Bana wrote that it had been a "difficult afternoon" in east Aleppo, and posted a video that seems to show smoke billowing out from a building in the area. 

Aleppo has been a hotbed of conflict throughout the Syrian civil war as multiple groups fight for control of what was once Syria's most populous city. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his Russian backers have launched a scorched-earth offensive on Aleppo in an effort to wipe out rebel holdouts in the city.

The Syrian regime and its Russian backers also stand accused of launching airstrikes that hit hospitals, schools, and local rescue centers, though Assad and Russian President Vladimir Putin have insisted that the offensives have only targeted militants. 

Civilians in Aleppo increasingly face food, healthcare, and education shortages as the fighting drags on. Russia has announced brief pauses in bombing the city, but has not coordinated with UN aide convoys to allow food in.

In October, the US suspended bilateral talks on Syria with Russia after the bombing of humanitarian aide convoy headed to the city by Syrian or Russian jets.

"Please allow [food] for the thousands starving here. Why is it a problem?" Fatemah Alabed tweeted on Friday. 

On Monday, pro-Assad forces announced that they had wrested control of a large swathe of eastern Aleppo from rebel forces in a major offensive that hopes to crush the opposition, but will also bring more destruction to city. 

The latest tweet from the account was posted on the same day Syrian government forces captured part of eastern Aleppo, and seems to respond to Assad's latest advance.

"[W]e are on the run as many people [were] killed right now in heavy bombardments," the tweet, written on Monday by Fatemah, read. 

It continued: "We are fighting for our lives. [S]till with you."

SEE ALSO: Syrian rebels have lost control of more than a third of east Aleppo amid a major offensive by pro-Assad forces

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Paris (AFP) - As the bombs rain down on the besieged city of Aleppo the scenes of suffering are horrific, yet the Syrian war fails to move people to protest in the way that the US intervention in Iraq or the siege of Sarajevo did.

In Paris' traditional place of protest, Place de la Republique, demonstrators spelled out "Free Syria" in candles last Friday as forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad increased their control of rebel-held areas of Aleppo.

But barely a hundred people took part in the protest.

"I find it hard to understand. This is a cause which people should rally around," said one of the participants, Ahmad Darkazanli, who originally comes from Aleppo but has lived in France for half a century.

It has been a similar story in London, Berlin and Rome — the plight of the Syrian people fails to strike a chord. "Aleppo is already a Sarajevo, a black chapter in the history of mankind and of international politics," Jan Egeland, the head of the UN-backed humanitarian taskforce for Syria, said recently.

No solidarity 

Intellectuals across Europe took up the fate of Sarajevo, the destroyed capital of Bosnia, during the 1992-1995 war and the conflicts in Gaza brought thousands of people into the streets.

The US intervention in Iraq unleashed massive demonstrations, including an estimated one million people who marched through London in February 2003. Yet Syria fails to stir the same feelings of solidarity.

As the war has ground on for five years, the mainstream media and social media have been filled with images of barrel bombs, children struggling to breathe after chemical weapons attacks, dead prisoners, and desperate families scrambling through the rubble of their shattered homes.

"It's so barbaric that it's hard for people to take in," Ziad Majed, a professor at the American University of Paris, said. 

Photographs of Aylan, the little Syrian boy found drowned on a Turkish beach, and the blood-streaked face of another child, five-year-old Omran, who had emerged from the rubble of his bombed home in Aleppo, caught the world's attention for a few days.

But, said Majed, "it's one horror after another and because people don't understand who is killing whom, they feel powerless and they don't want to look at it or think about it any more."

'Invisible' Syrian people

The complex nature of a conflict that began as a civil war after President Bashar al-Assad cracked down on the opposition but has gradually spread to the whole region and sucked in jihadist groups may be to blame for the general public's indifference.

"Who is against Assad? And who is on his side? Should tyrants be ousted? We saw where that led in Iraq and Syria," Stephan Polonski, an artist in Paris, said.

In the Middle Eastern "Great Game" that the Syrian war has become with Russia, Iran, Turkey and the Gulf states all playing a role, and the Islamic State jihadist group feeding off the resulting chaos, "the Syrian people and their aspirations for democracy are invisible", Majed said.

"I think the attacks carried out in Europe by Daesh (another acronym for IS) have exhausted the capacity of people in the West to show empathy or anger at what is happening in Syria," said Pauline Hamon, a journalist.

"As far as we are concerned the real enemy are these fanatics," Charlotte Cruchet, a housewife in her 40s, said. 

"Unfortunately, many people think that in the Middle East we're violent, we kill each other, we're incapable of being democratic and we've got the regimes we deserve," said Farouk Mardam-Bey, a French-Syrian publisher who is president of the French support group for the Syrian revolution, Souria Houria.

He points to the insidious effect of "influential" pro-regime websites who disseminate information from a war which is largely out of bounds to the mainstream media.

"Even among my left-wing friends, I often hear: 'Who is to say these horrifying images are not fabricated? Who is to say it's true?'" he said.

Since the war began, Souria Houria has organised hundreds of meetings and events, but the people who attend are normally the usual suspects -- individuals with a direct link to the war, artists and activists.

"When the bombing of Aleppo started (in September), we saw faces we hadn't seen before, 'ordinary people' who took part in our demonstrations in front of the Russian embassy in Paris," Mardam-Bey said. "But they were a very small group."

He sees one ray of hope, in Germany, which has taken in hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees, and where young Syrian authors are being translated into German for the first time.

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On the afternoon of August 31, 2013, French Rafale fighter jets bristled on their runways, readied for war. As far as French President Francois Hollande was concerned, D-Day had arrived; at 3 a.m. his planes would begin air strikes against missile batteries and command centers of the Syrian Army's 4th Armored Division -- the Syrian military's most trusted military unit, and the one in charge of chemical weapons.

The reason: Syrian President Bashar al-Assad had crossed U.S. President Barack Obama's "red line" when, just 10 days earlier, he had apparently used chemical weapons in Ghouta, a suburb of Damascus, against the rebels battling him and the civilians who, as usual, bore the brunt of Assad's fury. According to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, it was the regime's third -- and deadliest -- use of sarin gas to date. Now it was time to for the United States and its allies to make good on the president's word.

But at the last minute, Obama called Hollande to tell him the strikes were off; he would instead seek the backing of Congress before any military action was taken. It was support he most likely knew he would not get; at nearly the last possible moment, he had changed course.

This development was perhaps not entirely unsurprising. A key tenet of Obama's first presidential campaign was to withdraw the United States from its costly and bloody adventurism in the Middle East, a promise that was well received by an American public that had been at war since the 2001 intervention in Afghanistan and the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Since then, Obama has largely managed to keep his country out of the Middle East despite the region's descent into sanguinary chaos as Libya, Iraq, and Syria have steadily disintegrated while the militant group Islamic State (IS) has murdered its way into global headlines.

The United States has conducted air strikes against IS targets in Syria and Iraq, while it has "advisers" on the ground supporting the Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) and various groups battling IS in Syria. But, despite the White House's seeming refusal to be drawn into battle on the ground, U.S. involvement may go deeper than many Americans believe.

This month an improvised explosive device (IED) killed a U.S. Navy bomb-disposal technician in the town of Ain Issa, less than 60 kilometers from the de facto capital of IS's self-proclaimed caliphate -- making Senior Chief Petty Officer Scott C. Dayton the first U.S. serviceman to die in Syria and the fifth to be killed while fighting IS since 2015.

Many Americans -- especially those of an isolationist bent -- fear IS as a global terrorist threat and support an air campaign against the extremist group but discount its direct threat in Syria as of little concern. This is wrong. U.S. soldiers are indeed involved in the fight on the ground. America's sons and daughters in Syria are personally at risk from IS -- a fact that has so far been downplayed in the public discussion.

As Michael Weiss, senior editor at the Daily Beast and author of The New York Times bestseller ISIS: Inside The Army Of Terror, puts it: "U.S. Special Forces have been recorded embedded with Pentagon-backed rebel forces, such as Liwa al Mutasim, in northern Aleppo, where they were shouted at by Islamist rivals. Their remit may be to 'advise' or to help call in air strikes but it's naive to think that they won't, or don't, engage in combat."

He continues: "Their counterparts in Syria have traded direct fire with [IS] militants who have ambushed Kurdish Peshmerga (one incident previously resulted in the death of another U.S. soldier). The Pentagon likes to fudge this with terminology but the fact is: American boots are on the ground, and American servicemen are in an active state of war against [IS] -- and potentially any other hostile parties they come in contact with."

U.S. Secretary of Defense Ash Carter echoed Weiss's point, albeit more obliquely, with a public statement on Dayton's death: "I am deeply saddened by the news on this Thanksgiving Day that one of our brave service members has been killed in Syria while protecting us from the evil of ISIL," he said, using another shorthand term for IS. "It is a painful reminder of the dangers that men and women in uniform face around the world to keep us safe."

War By Any Other Name

There are around 500 U.S. troops in Syria -- in April, President Obama sent 250 to add to the 50 that were already in the country. The number since then has, accordingly, almost doubled. Earlier in November, Carter announced that the U.S.-supported coalition of Kurdish and Arab forces fighting IS known as the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) had begun the task of retaking Raqqa. As Iraqi forces meanwhile close in on the city of Mosul, in Iraq, the dual IS losses could signal the end of the last pretenses of its purported caliphate.

The numbers may be small, but evidence of "mission creep" is clear. Again, Weiss is unequivocal: "We are involved on the ground," he says. "We have CIA operatives in Iraq and Syria and U.S. soldiers. About 300 in Syria, close to 5/6K in Iraq. It's just not an occupation or 'major combat role,' but this is where 'war' is given to sort of Orwellian euphemisms that U.S. bureaucracy loves to use to deny it is doing exactly what you think it is doing."

The United States is fighting IS in Syria and Iraq in all but name. And as IS becomes increasingly besieged in both countries, it will become more desperate -- and more violent. Traditional warfare will be forsaken in favor of greater use of insurgency tactics. More booby traps and IEDs will lie in wait for both the SDF and ISF; and more U.S. servicemen may die.

U.S. President-elect Donald Trump has promised to bomb IS heavily and has talked about "extreme vetting" of Muslims traveling or potentially immigrating to the United States for fear of terrorist infiltration. But these views do little to address the reality on the ground that IS poses a threat not just as a worldwide militant group that can inspire atrocities on U.S. soil but also as a military threat to U.S. soldiers already fighting in Syria.

As much as some may deny it, the United States is once again fighting a war in the Middle East.

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ANKARA (Reuters) - The Turkish military lost contact on Tuesday with two of its soldiers deployed in the operation to sweep Islamic State from northern Syria, the army said in a statement.

The army said that contact with the soldiers was lost at around 3:30 p.m. local time (1230 GMT). It did not give any further details.

Islamic State's Amaq news agency earlier said that Islamic State fighters had captured two Turkish soldiers near a village west of al-Bab in the Aleppo countryside. Reuters was not immediately able to verify the authenticity of the claim.

(Reporting by Ece Toksabay, Orhan Coskun and Ali Abdelatti; Editing by David Dolan)

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The US-led coalition has provided ongoing air support for the Iraqi offensive against ISIS in Mosul, and as the fight rages for the terror group's last stronghold in that country, the coalition has also launched airstrikes against ISIS in Syria.

On November 19, the US-led coalition destroyed an ISIS training camp near Raqqa, the group's capital and its most important city in Syria, a clip of which you can see below.

In addition to the training camp, six strikes on that day targeted two ISIS tactical units, destroyed seven oil-production machines and one vehicle, and damaged a supply route.

The campaign in Mosul appears to have ISIS on the defensive, even as Iraqi forces and their allies advance slowly in the city's crowded streets. In contrast, efforts to attack Raqqa appear to have bogged down, with Kurdish militias making little progress and US-led strikes in the province mainly targeting the terror group's oil infrastructure.

Farther west, in Aleppo, a focal point in Syria's bloody five-year civil war, the tide appears to have turned decisively for the regime of Syrian dictator Bashar Assad, whose forces on Monday seized parts of the city that opposition rebels have held for four years.

Assad's Russian-backed military looks set to take control of all of Aleppo, and some 250,000 civilians who have been besieged in the eastern part of the city have gone without food, fuel, or aid for months.

Aid groups say civilians in the city are facing a "dire situation," but convoys with supplies have been unable to access eastern Aleppo. "In terms of east Aleppo, we just need the green light from the people who control the roads going in because, as you know, the east of Aleppo is besieged,"said Ramesh Rajasingham, UN deputy regional humanitarian coordinator for the Syria crisis.

After the failure of a US-Russian ceasefire in September, US efforts to affect a diplomatic solution to the war have amounted to little, even with ongoing negotiations in Geneva.

The US has seen its leverage steadily eroded, in part because of Syrian-Russian gains on the ground, and in part because of US President-elect Donald Trump's suggestions he will cooperate with Moscow.

While the US-led coalition continues to strike ISIS fighters and infrastructure in Iraq and Syria, people not affiliated with the terrorist group have been targeted accidentally.

The US government said in early November that 39 civilians had been killed in 13 strikes launched in Iraq since March, while a Pentagon report released on Tuesday admitted that airstrikes mounted by the US, Australia, Denmark, and Britain on September 17 had in fact killed dozens of Syrian armed forces personnel, rather than ISIS fighters.

US Brig. Gen. Richard Coe said the strikes were not illegal, as the mistake was not deliberate or the result of negligence.

You can see the full video of the November 19 strike on the Operation Inherent Resolve Facebook page.

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MOSCOW (Reuters) - The Kremlin said on Wednesday that Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan's statement that his forces in Syria were there to topple President Bashar al-Assad had come as a surprise to Moscow and that it expected an explanation from Ankara.

In a speech on Tuesday, Erdogan condemned what he said was the failure of the United Nations in Syria and cast Turkey's incursion in August, when it sent tanks, fighter jets and special forces over the border, as an act of exasperation.

"We are there to bring justice. We are there to end the rule of the cruel Assad, who has been spreading state terror," Erdogan said.

"The announcement really came as news to us," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on a conference call.

"It is a very serious statement and one which differs from previous ones and with our understanding of the situation. We hope that our Turkish partners will provide us with some kind of explanation about this."

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Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Wednesday that he and President-elect Donald Trump agreed during a recent phone call that US-Russian relations "must be straightened out."

"During my recent telephone conversation with Mr. Donald Trump, our opinions coincided that the current, unsatisfactory state of Russia-US relations, undoubtedly must be straightened out. As I already have said, our country is prepared to go down our part of that road," Putin said at a foreign policy conference in Moscow.

The Russian leader maintained that the decline in his country's relations with the US was "not our fault," though Putin presided over the illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014, the bombing of US-backed rebels in Syria last year, and the apparent Russian hacking of the DNC during the election.

Putin's comments came amid reports in the Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post that the Kremlin has been in touch with Trump and people close to him about the ongoing crisis in Syria.

During the campaign, Trump's son Donald Jr. met with pro-Russian diplomats in Paris who pressed the younger Trump to "reach an accord on the issue of the Syrian crisis" in partnership, instead of at odds, with Russia.

The pro-Russian diplomats that met with Trump Jr. support an end to the Syrian conflict that keeps Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in power, though the US under Obama has called for him to step aside and the international community has accused him of war crimes.

In speeches, Trump has characterized Assad as "killing ISIS," despite reports that the vast majority of Russian and Syrian airstrikes in Syria have been directed at anti-Assad rebels operating in western Syria, far from ISIS' holdouts in the east.

Recent polling carried out in Russia shows 71% of Russians favor strengthening economic, political, and cultural ties with the West, as the past several years of sanctions have been crippling to their economy. 

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Aleppo (Syria) (AFP) - Hundreds of elite Syrian troops moved into east Aleppo on Thursday ahead of a push into the most densely populated areas, after the UN warned the city risked becoming a "giant graveyard".

Despite fierce global criticism, forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad have pressed an assault to retake control of all of Aleppo, once Syria's commercial hub but now a divided city in ruins.

The assault -- backed by heavy artillery fire -- has spurred a mass exodus of tens of thousands of residents from rebel-held districts.

The relentless barrage has left Aleppo's streets strewn with the bodies of men, women, and children, many lying next to the suitcases they had packed to escape.

The steady artillery fire could again be heard pounding rebel areas early Thursday, with heavy rainfall adding to the misery. The assault has seen Assad's forces make significant gains in the last week.

After overrunning the city's northeast, they were in control of 40 percent of the territory once held by opposition forces in Aleppo, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

"The regime is tightening the noose on the remaining section of east Aleppo under rebel control," Observatory head Rami Abdel Rahman told AFP. He said hundreds of fighters from the elite Republican Guard and Fourth Division arrived in Aleppo on Thursday "in preparation for street battles" in the densely populated southeast.

"They are moving in on the ground, but they are afraid of ambushes because of the density of both residents and fighters," he said. 

The violence in Aleppo has sparked widespread outrage, but little concrete action from the international community. Speaking to a special Security Council session on Wednesday, UN humanitarian chief Stephen O'Brien made an urgent appeal.

"For the sake of humanity we call on -- we plead -- with the parties and those with influence to do everything in their power to protect civilians and enable access to the besieged part of eastern Aleppo before it becomes one giant graveyard," he said.

Children killed

Syrian warplanes have been pounding east Aleppo with air strikes for months -- often using crude munitions like barrel bombs -- but as the ground advance has gathered pace the army has instead turned to more precise artillery. The effect has been no less devastating.

On Thursday, four children from a single family were killed in artillery fire by regime forces on the rebel-held Maadi neighbourhood of Aleppo, according to the Observatory.

And at least 26 civilians, including seven children, were killed in shelling of the rebel-held Jubb al-Qubbeh district on Wednesday, the Observatory said. The latest attacks brought the civilian toll of the government's offensive to more than 300 civilians, including 42 children, since November 15. 

Retaliatory rocket fire by the rebels on government-held areas has killed 48 civilians, according to the Britain-based Observatory, which has a wide network of sources on the ground.

Thousands of people have sought refuge in the remaining rebel-held neighbourhoods in southeastern Aleppo, arriving with overpacked suitcases or sometimes just the clothes on their backs. Another 50,000 have poured out into territory controlled by government forces or local Kurdish authorities, according to the Observatory.

More than 300,000 people have been killed since Syria's conflict erupted in March 2011 with anti-government protests, before spiralling into a civil war. The loss of east Aleppo -- a rebel stronghold since 2012 -- would be the biggest blow to Syria's opposition in more than five years. 

'Deliberate starvation' 

The city had become a powerful symbol of Syria's uprising, producing some of the war's most iconic images -- including of Omran, the shell-shocked toddler in an ambulance. 

At Wednesday's special UN session on Aleppo, British ambassador Matthew Rycroft said Assad ally Russia was hamstringing the Security Council. Moscow launched a military campaign in support of Assad in September of last year and has since carried out of air strikes in Syria.

Rycroft accused Moscow, which in October vetoed a resolution to stop the bombing in Aleppo, of supporting "a deliberate act of starvation and a deliberate withholding of medical care." 

Russia's envoy, Vitaly Churkin, brushed off criticism and said Syria was seeking to eliminate extremists such as the Al-Nusra Front, which has rebranded itself the Fateh al-Sham Front after severing ties to Al-Qaeda. 

"We vehemently condemn any attempts to protect terrorists including any political action on a humanitarian pretext which, sadly alas, UN humanitarian works have been dragged into," Churkin said. 

US ambassador Samantha Power urged the Security Council to pass a resolution that would mandate a 10-day military halt to allow humanitarian supplies to enter Aleppo. But she feared a new Russian veto and acknowledged a brief halt "is barely even a Band-Aid and it is a sign in some ways of just how low our bar has become."

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Since World War II, the US has dominated the skies in any region in which it wishes to project power — but recent competition from countries like Russia and China threaten to erode that edge, and only a small group of elite pilots maintain the US's edge in air superiority.

Russia has deployed powerful missile-defense batteries to Syria and its European enclave of Kaliningrad. The US Air Force can't operate in those domains without severe risk. US President Barack Obama himself has acknowledged that these missile deployments greatly complicate and limit the US's options to project power in Syria.

China has undertaken the breathtaking feat of building and militarizing islands in the South China Sea, outfitting them with runways and radar sites that could allow Beijing to establish an air defense and identification zone, the likes of which the US would struggle to pierce.

Gen. David Goldfein, the Air Force chief of staff, speaking during the State of the Air Force address at the Pentagon, said of the Air Force's dwindling dominance: "I believe it's a crisis: air superiority is not an American birthright. It's actually something you have to fight for and maintain."

The US has the world's largest air force, but it is stretched thin across the entire globe. In the Pacific or the Baltics, smaller, more concentrated powers have reached parity or near parity with the US's gigantic fleet.

Only one US airframe remains head-and-shoulders above any and all competition: the F-22 Raptor.

The F-22 was the first fifth-generation fighter jet, and it is like nothing else on earth. The plane can execute mind-bending aerial maneuvers, sense incoming threats at incredible distances, and fly undetected by legacy aircraft.

The coming F-35 Lightning II, a stealthy technological marvel in its own right, has an impressive radar cross section approximately the size of a basketball. The F-22, however, blows it out of the water with a cross section about the size of a marble.

For this reason, the F-22 Raptor remains the US's only hope for breaching the most heavily protected airspace. Even so, an expert on Russian air defenses told Business Insider that F-22 pilots would have to be "operationally, tactically brilliant" to survive strikes against Russian-defended targets.

A recent article by The National Interest's Dave Majumdar seems to confirm that the US's Raptor pilots are indeed brilliant.

"Typically, we'll train against the biggest and baddest threats because we want to train against the newest threat on the block," one F-22 pilot told Majumdar.

"We're fighting against the most advanced operational threats we can," another said.

Even though the stealthy F-22s hold an overwhelming advantage at long range, because they can target enemies long before those enemies can see them, the Raptor pilots train for up-close conflicts as well. While close-range confrontations hugely disadvantage the F-22 pilots, they continue to train uphill and achieve impressive results.

As drivers of the most capable plane in the world, the F-22 pilots exist as a kind of "insurance policy" against the world's most advanced threats, Majumdar said.

"Even when flying against the most challenging simulated threats — advanced Russian fighters such as the Su-35 and S-300V4 and S-400 — it is exceedingly rare for an F-22 to be 'shot down.' 'Losses in the F-22 are a rarity regardless of the threat we're training against,'" an F-22 pilot told Majumdar.

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