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Dunford: No doubt Russia is responsible for aid convoy hit

American officials blame Russian Federation for the attacks, arguing that Moscow had agreed to make sure that the shaky ceasefire stays in place.

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Mr Kerry told the Security Council that while coalition members quickly admitted their mistake, Russian officials had offered different stories on who was responsible for Tuesday’s United Nations aid convoy bombing near Aleppo that killed 20 people.

“The evening of September 19 in the sky over that area at a height of 3600 metres and moving at a speed of 200 kilometres per hour there was an attack drone from the global coalition that took off from the Incirlik air base in Turkey”, Russian military spokesman Igor Konashenkov said. “All information on the convoy’s location (after that) was known only to the rebels controlling this area”, he said.

The US Central Command said the attack was “halted immediately” when Russian Federation warned it could be hitting Syrian troops. There were no reports of who carried out the strike.

Top U.S. officials blamed Russia for the convoy bombing and say they tracked two Russian Su-24 jets from a base in Latakia to the site of the strike.

Moscow has firmly denied involvement in the attacks.

Four aid workers were killed and one was critically injured Wednesday after an airstrike hit a medical clinic in northern Syria.

Secretary of State John Kerry called for called for the grounding all aircraft in the region Wednesday “in order to de-escalate the situation and give a chance for humanitarian aid to flow unimpeded”.

Kerry said efforts to broker a solution could be salvaged but only if Moscow takes responsibility for recent air strikes.

The news of the airstrike comes just as the United Nations announced Wednesday that it would resume delivery of aid to the war-torn country as early as Thursday.

The huge concern is that if the ceasefire deal entirely fails, which seems inevitable, the situation could devolve into a proxy war between the U.S. and Russian Federation – taking the world back to the dark days of the Cold War of last century, in places like Korea and Vietnam. Syrians living in opposition areas will be disproportionately affected because the U.N.’s major warehouses are located in government-held areas.

The mobile medical team was hit while responding to an earlier air strike targeting militants from the al Qaida-linked Fatah al-Sham Front, Dr Oubaida Al Moufti, vice president of the International Union of Medical Care and Relief Organisations said.

The UN estimates that some six million Syrians live in besieged and hard-to-reach areas. But it is the fate of the Syrian people that is most important.

In nearby Idlib, the Observatory said 12 civilians, including two children, were killed in at least eight air raids.

The only other “entities that fly in Syria right now are Russian Federation and Syria”.

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The town is besieged by government forces. IS shot down a government aircraft on Sunday in the eastern Deir el-Zour province.

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