The offer of amnesty follows
two weeks of the heaviest bombardment of the five-and-a-half-year civil
war, which has killed hundreds of people trapped inside Aleppo's rebel-held eastern sector and torpedoed a U.S.-backed peace initiative.
Fighters
have accepted similar government amnesty offers in other besieged areas
in recent months, notably in Daraya, a suburb of Damascus that was
under siege for years until rebels surrendered it in August.
However,
rebels said they had no plan to evacuate Aleppo, the last major urban
area they control, and denounced the amnesty offer as a deception.
"It's impossible for the rebel groups to leave Aleppo because this would be a trick by the regime," Zakaria Malahifji,
a Turkey-based official for the Fastaqim group which is present in
Aleppo, told Reuters. "Aleppo is not like other areas, it's not possible
for them to surrender."
Washington was also
skeptical of government motives: "For them to suggest that somehow
they're now looking out for the interests of civilians is outrageous,"
White House spokesman Josh Earnest said, citing the heavy civilian toll
from air strikes and bombardment.
The army
announced a reduction in shelling and air strikes on Wednesday to allow
people to leave. It backed that up with an ultimatum: "All those who do
not take advantage of the provided opportunity to lay down their arms or
to leave will face their inevitable fate."
The
government also sent text messages to the mobile phones of some of those
people trapped in the besieged sector, telling them to repudiate
fighters in their midst. More than 250,000 people are believed to be
trapped inside rebel-held eastern Aleppo, facing dire shortages of food
and medicine.
Speaking to Danish television, Assad
said he would "continue the fight with the rebels until they leave
Aleppo. They have to. There's no other option."
He
said that he wanted rebels to accept a deal to leave the city along
with their families and travel to other rebel-held areas, as in Daraya.
Neither Assad nor his generals gave a timeline for rebels to accept
their offer.
Washington
accuses Moscow and Damascus of war crimes for intentionally targeting
civilians, aid deliveries and hospitals to break the will of those
trapped in the besieged city. Russia and Syria accuse the United States
of supporting terrorists by backing rebel groups.
A
U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that the
relentless Russian and Syrian bombardments could result in the fall of
rebel-held eastern Aleppo within "weeks if not days".
"It’s
unclear how long they will last, but considering the destruction of
infrastructure that supports life, they are hanging by a thread," the
U.S. official said. "There is only so much they can endure.
The
war has already killed hundreds of thousands, made half of Syrians
homeless, dragged in global and regional powers and left swathes of the
country in the hands of jihadists from Islamic State who have carried
out attacks around the globe.
The United States
and Russia are both fighting against Islamic State but are on opposite
sides in the wider civil war, with Moscow fighting to protect Assad and
Washington supporting rebels against him.
Storming
Aleppo's rebel-held zone, which includes big parts of the densely
populated Old City, could take months and cause a bloodbath, the U.N.
Syria envoy warned on Thursday.
"The bottom line
is in a maximum of two months, two and a half months, the city of
eastern Aleppo at this rate may be totally destroyed," said Staffan de
Mistura, invoking the 1990s atrocities of the Rwandan genocide and
Yugoslavia's civil war.
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