Despite Government Advances and New Clashes, Some Aleppo Residents Say They Will Never Leave

— -- Abdulkafi Alhamdo has never held a weapon in his life. But in the near future, he says, he might have to learn how to load a gun.

“Everyone inside Aleppo can be forced to carry weapons because it’s a matter of life and death,” Alhamdo, a 31-year-old teacher in the government-besieged part of Aleppo, told ABC News. “The whole world has let us down and we’re not going to wait for anyone else to defend us if we are forced to leave or be killed.”

Today, government forces advanced in Bazo Hill, in the southern edge of Aleppo, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights and Syrian state news agency SANA. Residents in the besieged part of the city said they heard the sound of clashes and bombs. New battles have erupted in Aleppo following a brief “humanitarian pause” declared by Russia.

Russian and Syrian officials had suggested that after the cease-fire, the Syrian and Russian armies would launch a new offensive to clear rebel-held Aleppo of the forces fighting the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. But no one left the besieged city during the Russian pause, which many locals described as a “media stunt” while humanitarian organizations said it was too short. Alhamdo said that people who decided to stay in Aleppo made that decision a long time ago and are not going to change their minds. He lives with his wife and 8-month old daughter, but the rest of his family are outside Aleppo. He is not going to join them because he doesn’t want to give up on the Syrian revolution, he says.

“People sometimes ask me, ‘Wouldn’t you like a better life for your daughter?’ Yes, I would. I want her to live without fear and to live with freedom and democracy. I want her to be able to say ‘I don’t like that’ if there’s something she doesn’t like. If I took her and fled from Syria she might blame me and say ‘my blood is not worth more than the blood of the children who died,’” said Alhamdo.

He added that he’d rather live with airstrikes and hunger than go back to living under the Syrian government when he risked prison for expressing his opinions.

"Yes, we might lose and yes, we might die. But even if that happens, I am sure that the revolution will come back and the next generation will remember that we didn’t give up," he said.

Aleppo locals said the government dropped leaflets on their neighborhoods, urging them to leave. "This is your last hope... Save yourselves. If you don't leave these areas quickly, you will be destroyed," reads one leaflet, seen by ABC News. But like Alhamdo, several other residents said they never considered leaving. Omair Shaaban moved from west Aleppo to the rebel-held part of the city to support people there as an aid worker and now as a media activist. He said that when the government advances it makes him less hopeful that the siege imposed on eastern Aleppo will be broken -- but that he would never leave the area.

“It’s my city and the people here are like my family,” he told ABC News. “We live under siege and destruction, but I can’t stand the idea of living under the government and if I left I might be imprisoned.”

Since the Syrian government launched an offensive on rebel-held Aleppo in late September, at least 500 people have been killed and 2,000 injured, with more than a quarter of all deaths being children, according to the U.N. Humanitarian organizations have criticized Russia and the Syrian government for using weapons that are banned under international law, such as cluster bombs, chemical weapons and bunker-buster bombs, which can target civilians sheltering underground. The Violations Documentation Center, which documents human rights violations in Syria, recorded 137 cluster bomb attacks in Aleppo from Sept. 10 to Oct. 10. At the same time, the people of Aleppo, are in urgent need of food, health care and clean water. The city has not received U.N. aid since early July.

“It’s time to break the siege,” Wissam Zarqa, a teacher in rebel-held Aleppo, told ABC News. “We civilians, teachers and doctors don’t have military practice. But we can pressure the Free Syrian Army to fight to break the siege and tell them that it’s their duty. We, who stayed, are optimistic and I believe that they can break the siege.”

During an emergency session of the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva Friday, the U.N.’s humanitarian chief said that Aleppo has become a “slaughterhouse.”

“The ancient city of Aleppo, a place of millennial civility and beauty, is today a slaughterhouse -- a gruesome locus of pain and fear, where the lifeless bodies of small children are trapped under streets of rubble and pregnant women deliberately bombed,” the U.N.’s High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein said in a speech to the council. He said that the siege and bombing of Aleppo amount to “war crimes” and that the situation there should be referred to the International Criminal Court.