UN: Syrian opposition must accept it has not won the war

“The issue is … will the opposition be able to be unified and realistic enough to realize they did not win the war?” he said, Reuters reported.

Asked if he was implying that Assad had won, he said: “I am not the one to write the history of this conflict … but at the current moment I don’t think anyone can actually claim to have won the war.”

The Syrian forces have been fighting different foreign-backed armed groups and terrorists wreaking havoc in the Arab country since 2011.

More than 310,000 people have been killed in the conflict. The fighting has displaced more than half the population, internally or abroad.

 

Corridor into Deir al-Zor

 

The Syrian Army and its allies are fighting to secure and expand a precarious corridor to their comrades in Deir al-Zor, a day after they smashed through Daesh lines to break the terrorist siege.

The army reached Deir al-Zor city on Tuesday in a sudden, days-long thrust that followed months of steady advances east across the desert, breaking a siege that had lasted three years.

However, Daesh counter-attacks lasted through the night, the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said, as the terrorists tried to repel the army.

It points to a tough battle ahead as the army aims to move from breaching the siege to driving Daesh from its half of the city, the sort of street-by-street warfare in which the terrorists excel.

“The next step is to liberate the city,” a commander in the military alliance backing President Bashar al-Assad said.

 

Dozen killed in US airstrikes

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A so-called monitoring group said at least a dozen civilians have lost their lives when the US-led coalition purportedly fighting the Daesh terrorist group conducted a series of aerial assaults on Syria’s terrorist-held northern city of Raqqah.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported on Wednesday that 12 civilians, including two children and four women, had lost their lives in the attacks against residential areas in the city, located about 455 kilometers (283 miles) northeast of the capital Damascus, Press TV reported.

The report came only two days after Syria’s official news agency SANA reported that at least 14 civilians had been killed in similar airstrikes against Al-Naim district in the city.

The raids also severely damaged private property and civilian infrastructure in the targeted area.

The city of Raqqah, which lies on the northern bank of the Euphrates River, was overrun by Daesh terrorists in March 2013, and was proclaimed the center for most of the administrative and control tasks of the terrorist group the following year.

The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) says Daesh terrorists are holding some of the civilians trapped in Raqqah as human shields.

The US-led coalition has been conducting airstrikes against what are said to be Daesh targets inside Syria since September 2014 without any authorization from the Damascus government or a UN mandate.

 

Aug. death report

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According to AA, a total of 772 civilians were killed in Syria last month, according to a new report by a London-based NGO devoted to tracking rights violations in war-torn Syria.

In a monthly report issued Sunday, the Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR) documents civilian deaths throughout Syria during the month of August.

According to the SNHR, international coalition forces – led by the US – were responsible for most of last month’s civilian deaths.

The report found that at least 285 civilians, including 58 women and 97 children, were killed by coalition forces during the period in question.