The United States is demanding that Russian Federation live up to its commitments in Syria’s fractured week-old truce.
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Kerry expressed frustration with the touch-and-go cease-fire.
Asked about the army’s statement, Kerry told reporters in NY that the seven days of calm and aid deliveries envisaged in the truce had not yet taken place. The statement said the rebels wasted a “real chance” to stop the bloodshed.
The air raid by the US-led coalition allegedly killed dozens of Syrian soldiers and led to a harsh verbal attack on Washington by Damascus and Moscow.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said at least 12 were killed in the attack, mostly truck drivers and Red Crescent workers.
“Considering that the conditions of the ceasefire are not being respected by the rebels, we consider it pointless for the Syrian government forces to respect it unilaterally”, Lieutenant General Sergei Rudskoy said in a televised briefing.
“Fierce fighting with the terrorists is now underway in the area of the airport where for a long a time humanitarian aid for civilians was parachuted”. “I believe that the truce is clinically dead”.
GENEVA Aid convoys for four Syrian towns will be postponed as staff reassess security after a deadly attack on relief trucks and intensified violence, a senior official from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said on Tuesday.
The incident led to sharp exchanges between Russian Federation and the USA, with Moscow saying the strike was “on the boundary between criminal negligence and direct connivance with Islamic State terrorists”.
Besher Hawi, the former spokesman for the opposition’s Aleppo city council, said: “It started with an hour of extremely fierce bombing”.
The United States declared Monday that Russian Federation had failed to meet its side of a deal to enforce a seven-day truce in Syria, but that Washington was willing to keep working on it.
It said in a statement that “terrorist groups”, a term the Syrian government uses to refer to all insurgents fighting against it, had failed to commit to any of the provisions of the deal, and had used the ceasefire to rearm whilst violating it 300 times.
The US ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power, offered her condolences on behalf of President Barack Obama but insisted that the attack on Assad’s forces was unintentional.
The US Central Command has issued a statement, saying that it had no intention of targeting Syrian government forces near Dier ez-Zor. Australian, British and Danish warplanes were involved in that attack on Syrian army positions.
Syrian state TV is quoting President Bashar Assad as saying that the airstrike of the US -led coalition against his troops was meant to support the Islamic State group.
On Monday, the opposition reported 254 violations by government forces and their allies since the truce started on September 12.
A statement said the United Kingdom was “fully co-operating with the coalition investigation” and stressed that it “would not intentionally target Syrian military units”.
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But, in a strongly worded statement from Russia’s foreign ministry, Moscow said the error was the result of Washington’s “stubborn refusal” to cooperate in fighting IS militants.
