Syrian army ground forces and allies have liberated 52 blocks in the eastern parts of the city of Aleppo from the grip of foreign-backed militants and are now in control of 93 percent of the whole northwestern city, Russia says.

“As a result of a successful advance, 52 districts of eastern Aleppo have been freed from militants,” Russian Defense Ministry official Sergei Rudskoi said in comments broadcast on state television on Friday.

“Over the past four days, territory controlled by militants decreased by one third. The Syrian army controls 93 percent of the city’s territory,” he added.

He said as many as 10,500 people have left eastern Aleppo in the last 24 hours, adding that the city’s residents have reported torture, public executions by the so-called moderate militants backed by the US and its allies.

"Civilians who escaped from terrorists talk about new crimes committed by militants of the so-called moderate opposition in eastern Aleppo. Cases of torture, public executions and massacres of the population have been confirmed,” the Russian official said.

Rudskoi noted that over 3,000 residents of the strategic city have so far returned to their houses and added that dozens of tonnes of humanitarian aid have been delivered to liberated Aleppo districts on a daily basis.

He further said more than 1,000 militants have surrendered arms and left eastern Aleppo while 953 of them have been granted amnesty.

“Thus, the Syrian government fully fulfills its obligations to help return participants of illegal armed groups to peaceful life," the Russian general added.

Damascus has called on the militants holed up in Aleppo’s east to lay down arms and surrender. The Syrian president has ordered for those militants choosing to stop fighting to be granted amnesty.

Elsewhere, Rudskoi stressed that Russian and Syrian warplanes have not carried out any airstrike over Aleppo since October 18.

“I emphasize that such results [in Aleppo's liberation] have been achieved only by Syrian army's ground forces,” Rudskoi pointed out.

He further said that 21 facilities, including two schools and two mosques, have been cleared of explosive devices in Aleppo over the past 24 hours, adding that over 1,040 settlements have joined the ceasefire in Syria.

Syria has set up several humanitarian corridors to facilitate the exit of civilians from the eastern districts. Reports coming out of Aleppo say the terrorists are using people as human shields to slow the army’s advances.

The Russian Defense Ministry said in a statement earlier on Friday that around 8,500 civilians have been evacuated from the militant-held eastern side of Aleppo via humanitarian corridors.

The statement added that there were 2,934 children among those evacuated from the occupied parts of Aleppo and resettled in the government-held part over the past 24 hours.

Footage released on Friday showed residents from the city’s al-Ramusi district staying in tents as reconstruction of the area started.

Some of the residents were resting inside the temporary accommodation while others started to clear rubble away in preparation for the rebuilding.

Meanwhile, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad said in a recent interview that the victory in the battle for Aleppo will be “a huge step” in bringing the war in Syria to an end.

“It’s true that Aleppo will be a win for us, but let’s be realistic, it won’t mean the end of the war in Syria. But it will be a huge step towards this end,” Assad said in an interview with al-Watan newspaper.

The recent army gains have flown in the face of the unstinting financial and military support, which many foreign states have been providing to the militants since 2011 to secure the ouster of President Assad.

‘Syria ready to resume dialogue with opposition’

In another development, Syria’s official SANA news agency quoted a Foreign Ministry source as saying that the government was ready to engage in talks with the opposition without any preconditions or external intervention.

The government is ready to resume "Syrian-Syrian dialogue," the statement said.


(Press Tv)

The stately 18-foot-tall giraffe is among the animals ecologists call “charismatic megafauna,” the name for critters that elicit squeals of delight at the zoo and warm the cockles of corporate marketers. Of the most charming beasts, though, giraffes never managed to generate attention on par with rhinoceroses — a subspecies of which is poised to vanish — or elephants, facing a long and bitter history of ivory poaching.

Researchers were not immune to passing over the giraffe, either. In September, Axel Janke, a German evolutionary biologist, laid it out to National Geographic like this: “Only 400 scientific papers have been written about giraffes, versus 20,000 papers on white rhinos.” The animal was so understudied that just how many species of giraffe exist is a matter of some debate.

But it was agreed, during a meeting of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature on Wednesday, that the tallest species on the planet is rarer than previously understood.

“There is a silent extinction going on,” Julian Fennessy, an IUCN giraffe specialist and director of the Giraffe Conservation Foundation, told The Washington Post by phone early Thursday.

The IUCN, an international NGO headquartered in Switzerland, manages guidelines called the Red List. The Red List is designed to help nations conserve threatened species. If sufficient information exists about the animals, the list classifies creatures on a scale from least concern to extinct. As recently as 2010, the IUCN listed the giraffe as species of least concern.

On Wednesday, the IUCN downgraded the giraffe from least concern, skipped “near threatened” and classified the animal as vulnerable. The giraffe shares this status with the cheetah, the leatherback sea turtle and other species. Giraffes are now considered by the IUCN to be as threatened as African elephants, though the giraffe population is a quarter of its pachyderm neighbors.

“One of the world’s most recognizable animals and the tallest land mammal,” wrote the IUCN in a statement released Thursday, “is now threatened with extinction.”

Giraffes numbered between 151,000 and 163,000 animals, according to a 1985 estimate. A new assessment, per a IUCN giraffe specialist group formed four years ago, determined that the animals declined to 97,562 in 2015. That is, over the course of three giraffe generations, the population plummeted between 36 and 40 percent. Going back even further in history, Fennessy said, could paint an even grimmer picture; 200 years ago, it is possible there were as many as a million giraffes across Africa, he said.

The IUCN cited human population growth and poaching as factors for the decline. Habitat loss, too, played a role. A June 2015 study of Serengeti giraffes found their diet took a hit after woody, “unpalatable species” of trees grew up where the tastier acacia plants once grew. In areas disturbed by war and civil unrest, such as South Sudan, giraffe subspecies such as the Nubian giraffe have dropped by as much as 95 percent.

[Giraffes aren’t just giraffes. Turns out there are four species.]

Fennessy and other conservationists hope the vulnerable status will bring needed attention to giraffes. “People see the animals on safari in Kruger National Park,” he said, referring to a well-managed wildlife reserve in South Africa, “and they assumed that giraffes are everywhere.” As the decline shows, that is not the case.

In addition to conservationists, biologists are also taking a closer look at the long-necked icon. Zookeepers knew the animals would let loose the occasional snort, but scientists only recently discovered that the creatures emit deep hums, on the low end of human hearing, after nightfall. Researchers are unspooling giraffe DNA to determine how it evolved to stand so tall.

There are in fact four different species of giraffe, not one, argued a genetic analysis published in September. The IUCN, on the other hand, recognizes only one species — Giraffa camelopardalis — with nine subspecies.

(The Washington Post)