New Zealand is now the President of the Security Council and convened a high level meeting on Syria in NY today during UN Leaders’ week.
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UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on Wednesday called on the UN Security Council to fully support his special envoy in working on convening formal talks to resolve the Syria conflict. United States officials say they believe Russian Federation carried out the strike.
“But I got to tell you, people running around with guns on the ground, from the air, is a very different thing to trucks in a convoy with big United Nations markings all over them”, Mr Kerry, comparing the coalition’s accidental bombing to the aid convoy attack, said.
Despite the administration’s outrage over the use of banned chemical weapons and the systematic bombing of hospitals and other civilian areas by the forces of President Bashar Assad, Obama has maintained that military intervention by United States ground forces is not a viable solution. US Secretary of State John Kerry told the Security Council that a no-fly zone for war planes must be established above the routes that supply trucks travel.
However, Mr. Ban said, the attack on a UN-Syrian Arab Red Crescent humanitarian convoy two days ago was an “outrage”, resulting in several casualties and forcing the UN to suspend aid operations. Then, a Russian ambassador said forces were targeting another area.
“You have now no higher responsibility in your service as members of the United Nations Security Council”, Ban said.
Lavrov told the council that there would be “no more unilateral pauses” by Assad’s government forces, arguing that opposition fighters on the ground had used those ceasefires in the past to regroup.
“We must remain determined that the ceasefire will be revived”, Ban said. -Russian military partnership against the Islamic State and al-Qaida.
Sergey V. Lavrov (left), Minister for Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation, and John Kerry, Secretary of State of the United States, speak to correspondents following a Middle East Quartet meeting.
“Advancing a political solution must be the priority in the weeks ahead”.
In northwest Idlib province, 16 Syrians were killed in the town of Khan Sheikhun, according to the organization.
An airstrike in northern Syria on Wednesday killed four medics responding to an earlier bombing raid, the Associated Press reported.
It was a sleepless night for many Aleppo residents, Agence France-Presse’s correspondent in the city said on Wednesday, with bombardment continuing until rain broke out over the city at dawn.
In the rebel-held neighborhood of Sukkari, Abu Ahmad cleared rubble and shattered glass from his doorstep after bombardment leveled the 6-story building next door, killing his neighbors.
Such drones are armed with air-to-ground missiles, he said, adding, “Only the drone’s owners know what it was doing there at the necessary moment and what tasks it was carrying out”.
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The next ISSG meeting will reportedly be held on Thursday afternoon.
