On Saturday, an errant USA airstrike that was supposed to target Islamic State militants in Syria instead killed 60 people that Syria’s government and its Russian allies identified as Syrian soldiers; both Syria and Russia suggested that the assault was deliberate, despite US apologies.
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The Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said Tuesday that aid deliveries set to reach besieged and hard-to-reach areas in war-torn Syria have been temporarily put on hold following an airstrike on a UN/Syrian Arab Red Crescent convoy Monday.
“All of our information indicates clearly that this was an airstrike”, Rhodes said, rejecting denials by Russia’s Defense Ministry.
A U.S. official told media that Russian fighter jets were operating in the area where the aid convoy was struck in the Aleppo region late Monday.
It was carrying food, medicine, emergency health kits, IV fluids and other essentials supplied by the UN’s World Health Organization.
“The ceasefire is not dead”, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said after the meeting, which he hosted with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.
The U.S. officials said that the Obama administration wanted to allow Moscow the time and space to investigate and announce its own conclusions about the bombing, which destroyed 18 of 31 trucks authorized to travel to a rebel-held area in northern Syria.
Both Moscow and Damascus have denied responsibility for the attack.
“There are no craters and the exterior of the vehicles do not have the kind of damage consistent with blasts caused by bombs dropped from the air”.
The White Helmets is a volunteer civil defense organization that operates throughout opposition-controlled Syria and is often linked to militants from the group formerly known as Al-Nusra Front.
Russia’s military also sought to discount the account of activists who presented video evidence of the attack.
“Only representatives of the “White Helmets” organisation close to the Nusra Front who, as always, found themselves at the right time in the right place by chance with their video cameras can answer who did this and why”.
The state department said the ceasefire under the US-Russian plan is not dead. “The bombardment was continuous, continuous”.
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Near the central city of Homs, the army shelled one village, while helicopters and warplanes bombed several other places, including the rebel-held town of Rastan, it said.
