BEIRUT (AP)
-- Syrian warplanes stepped up airstrikes on rebel-held districts in
Aleppo on Tuesday, the third day of an assault that has killed more than
100 people in the northern city, activists said.
The
strikes come hours after U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon demanded a
cease-fire in the nearly 3-year-old conflict, in which more than 120,000
people have been killed.
The escalation
suggested the Assad government was redoubling efforts to drive the
opposition out of Aleppo, Syria's largest city and once the country's
commercial hub, before a peace conference expected to take place in
Switzerland in five weeks.
The opposition has
controlled parts of the city for more than a year. On Tuesday, the main
Western-backed opposition group, the Syrian National Council, accused
the international community of "failing to take any serious position
that would guarantee a stop to the bloodbath" ahead of the talks.
The
Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said Tuesday that the
airstrikes had killed 15 people, including two children, in the
rebel-held Shaar district.
On Sunday, 76
people, including 28 children, died in air raids, opposition groups
said. The city was hit by another round of airstrikes on Monday.
Ban
told reporters in New York on Monday that the situation in Syria has
"deteriorated beyond all imagination" and insisted that the fighting
stop before political dialogue on Syria can start.
Brokered
by Russia and the United States, peace talks between the Syrian
opposition and Assad's government are scheduled to begin in January in
the Swiss city of Montreux.
Plans are under
way to organize a one-day meeting of foreign ministers in the city ahead
of the Syrian talks, U.N. officials said Tuesday.
U.S.
Secretary of State John Kerry, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov
and more than two dozen other foreign ministers would gather for the
Jan. 22 meeting at a Montreux hotel.
The
conference will later reconvene on Jan. 24 for the start of actual
negotiations between Syria's warring sides, said Khawla Mattar, a
spokeswoman for the U.N.'s special envoy to Syria, Lakhdar Brahimi.
Violence
in Syria has surged in the past weeks as the warring sides try to claim
or hold on to territory as a possible bargaining chip in the
negotiations.
The U.N. chief on Monday called
for a cease-fire ahead of the peace conference, to give a chance for it
to succeed, but the call fell on deaf ears.
Civilians continue to pay the highest price in the conflict after even the most modest attempts at peace have failed.
On
Monday alone, at least 150 people were killed nation-wide, according to
the Observatory, which relies on a wide network of activists on the
ground. Most of the casualties were reported in and around Syria's
largest cities, including in the capital, Damascus, Aleppo and the
central city of Homs.
The high daily death
toll coincided with the United Nations' $6.5 billion appeal to help
displaced Syrians and their host countries as civil war is expected to
rage on well into 2014.
Nearly 9 million
Syrians have been uprooted from their homes, with some 2.3 million
fleeing into neighboring countries and millions of other searching for
shelter in safer parts of Syria.
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Associated Press writer John Heilprin in Geneva contributed to this report.