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Reuters
BEIRUT/MOSCOW
Russia will establish a humanitarian corridor and implement a five-hour daily truce in Syria's eastern Ghouta, it said on Monday, after a UN Security Council resolution demanding a 30-day ceasefire across the entire country.
Over the past week Syria's army and its allies have subjected the rebel-held enclave of eastern Ghouta near Damascus to one of the heaviest bombardments of the seven-year war, killing hundreds.
On Sunday health authorities there said several people had suffered symptoms consistent with chlorine gas exposure and on Monday rescue workers and a war monitor said seven small children were killed by air and artillery strikes in one town.
"Eastern Ghouta cannot wait, it is high time to stop this hell on earth,"UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres told the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, calling for implementation of the ceasefire.
Fighting has raged across Syria since Saturday's resolution, as Turkey presses its offensive against a Kurdish militia in Afrin, rival rebel groups fight each other in Idlib and a US-led coalition targets Islamic State in the east.. Russia's defence minister was cited by the RIA news agency as saying President Vladimir Putin had ordered a daily ceasefire in eastern Ghouta from 9am to 2pm each day and for the creation of a"humanitarian corridor"to allow civilians to leave.
Russia, along with Iran and Shi'ite militias, is a major backer of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and it joined the war on his side in 2015, helping him claw back important areas.
The Russian defence minister, Sergei Shoigu, did not say whether the Syrian government or other allied forces had agreed to abide by the five-hour daily truce.
Mohamad Alloush, the political chief of one of eastern Ghouta's biggest rebel factions, said the Syrian army and its allies had launched"a sweeping ground assault"after the UN resolution, adding it was vital that the truce be implemented.
"We hope for real, serious, practical action,"he said. A picture issued by Civil Defence rescue workers, which could not independently verify, showed seven small bodies lying next to each other, wrapped in white and blue sheets, after air and artillery strikes on the town of Douma in eastern Ghouta.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based war monitor, said four of them were among a single family of nine killed by an air strike. The other three were among seven killed by shelling in the same town, it said.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said allegations the Syrian government was responsible for any chemical attack, after reports of people suffering symptoms of chlorine gas poisoning, were aimed at sabotaging the truce.
