A new school year began in Aleppo over the weekend but few children made it to class in the besieged side of the Syrian city, where residents are under unprecedented bombardment. 

Most parents did not want to risk sending their children to schools. 

Only six per cent of opposition-held east Aleppo’s 100,000 children have enrolled, Save the Children estimated. 

Bana al-Abed, seven, is one of the many who stayed home. Her school in the al-Shaar neighbourhood was damaged by a bomb over the summer and has not been rebuilt. 

She dreams of being a teacher like her mother, Fatemah, who is tutoring her from books they have in the house. 

“There were very few students there today, but we can’t let the war deny them an education,” said English teacher Abdulkami al-Hamdo, who held classes for the few dozen pupils who made it.

“This was the first time they had been to school in four months,” Mr Hamdo said. The start of term had to be postponed due to intense shelling in September.

“Those that came were so happy to be outside their house, where they wait for the bombs to drop and think only of war, killing, siege and hunger,” he said. “School is so important because it is their one escape from all that.”

Some two-thirds of schools have moved underground to protect against the strikes. 

“It is horrible for the children to have to learn like this,” said resident Mohammed Zein Khandakani, 28, who took his sister’s two orphan children to school yesterday. “They are scared of being underground because it feels like night time, which is when the regime drops its bombs,” he told the Telegraph.

However, even basements no longer offer the safety they once did. In the last week Russia has begun dropping so-called bunker-buster bombs, which burrow five feet underground before exploding.

“The use of bunker-busting bombs means there is literally nowhere we can keep children safe, and we want to see the use of these weapons investigated as a potential war crime,” said Nick Finney, Save the Children’s north west Syria country director.

“We’re now more likely to see children being pulled from the rubble or treated on the floor of a hospital than sat at a school desk.”

Images of wounded and screaming children, covered in dust or being pulled out of rubble, have become a daily reality in Aleppo.

More than 100 children have died in the past few days and hundreds more injured. Five died in hospital due to a lack of ventilators. 

Nearly 2,000 bombs have been dropped on the eight mile-by-three mile enclave since the ceasefire collapsed late last month. The campaign has wreaked destruction on schools, hospitals, clinics, residential buildings, water stations and electric generators.

Stephen O'Brien, who heads the United Nations humanitarian office (OCHA), issued a fresh plea to ease the suffering of some 250,000 people besieged by the pro-government forces’ offensive to retake the key city.

Troops pressed on with their week-long ground operation on Sunday, telling rebel fighters to leave and that they would grant them safe passage out. 

Mr O'Brien said that civilians were facing "a level of savagery that no human should have to endure."

He called for "urgent action to bring an end to their living hell”, warning that there would soon be no more hospitals left to treat the wounded and the “clock was ticking.”

Source: The Telegraph