Syrian guns fall silent to allow Aleppo's dead to be collected
GUNS fell silent in one of the main battle zones of Syria's biggest city, Aleppo, today to let aid workers collect 31 bodies that had been rotting amid the rubble of the front line - the first truce in months of warfare in the city.
Red Crescent workers and members of an opposition local council drove into the edge of the working class al-Sakhour district in north Aleppo to pick up the mostly civilian dead, many of them hit by army sniper fire, as fighters from the two sides looked on, activists and rebel military sources said.
The opposition Aleppo Media Centre said the majority of the bodies, which included children, had already decomposed.
Some had been lying in the streets and between buildings for months. Three bodies were found with their hands tied and four were burnt beyond recognition, the monitoring group said.
Video footage taken by the centre showed blue, grey and white body bags containing the corpses being unloaded into a schoolyard by men wearing masks and gloves.
"They were lying in no man's land and rotting. With the weather changing, I think the other side was worried about disease spreading and allowed the truce," one rebel commander said.
"They were mostly inhabitants of the area. Some had fled and came back to check their houses on the front line, and were hit by the government's snipers."
Large parts of Aleppo, once a cosmopolitan commercial hub, have fallen to Sunni Islamist opposition forces in the two-year-old uprising against President Bashar al-Assad, who belongs to the Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shi'ite Islam.
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