GENEVA (AP) — The U.N.’s human rights office warned today of an “imminent” showdown between government troops and opposition force in Syria’s second-largest city, Aleppo.
The rebels are locked in fierce fighting with the government troops in Aleppo and are bracing for an attack amid reports that the regime is massing reinforcements to retake the embattled city of 3 million.
Expressing her “deep alarm” at the situation, U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay said the reports coming out of Damascus “along with the reported build-up of forces in and around Aleppo, bodes ill for the people of that city.”
Part of the reasons for that, she said in a statement read aloud to reporters today in Geneva by her spokesman Rupert Colville, are the “as yet unconfirmed reports of atrocities, including extrajudicial killings and shooting of civilians by snipers” during fighting in the suburbs of Damascus.
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