Rebel officials and rescue workers said incendiary bombs were among the weapons that rained from the sky on the city.
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US officials question whether Russian Federation is able or willing to control forces under the control of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
“It was like there was coordination between the planes and the artillery shelling, because the shells were hitting the same locations that the planes hit”, he said.
The International Syria Support Group met on the sidelines of the annual United Nations gathering of world leaders in NY as the Syrian army announced the start of a new military offensive in the rebel-held east of the city of Aleppo.
Russian Federation provided “unsatisfactory” answers, French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault said. That fact is not only a tragedy for scores of Syrians trapped in a ceaseless cycle of violence that has already killed an estimated 500,000 people, but also a profound problem for world leaders, especially President Obama and soon either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump.
But the truce effectively collapsed after one week when an aid convoy was bombed on Monday and some 20 people were killed. The U.S. believes that a Russian-piloted aircraft carried out the strike, said a senior American official, who wasn’t authorized to speak publicly on the matter and demanded anonymity.
A spokesman for the U.S. State Department dismissed Assad’s claims as “ridiculous”, adding that they underline that Assad has lost his legitimacy to govern.
In a tense televised exchange with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov at the United Nations on Wednesday, Kerry said stopping the bombardment was the last chance to find a way “out of the carnage”.
Syria’s military command for Aleppo says it is commencing operations in the contested city’s rebel-held eastern quarters. The Syrian capital, seat of Assad’s power, has stayed relatively untouched throughout the conflict, spared the devastation inflicted on other, opposition-held areas of the country.
Recriminations over the attack the next day, on a convoy delivering aid to a rebel held area in Syria’s north, are still reverberating around the world.
“We are sending today an inter-agency convoy that will cross conflict lines into a besieged area of rural Damascus”, Jens Laerke, spokesman of the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), told Reuters.
During the wide-ranging hearing, Dunford also said the Obama administration is considering directly arming the Syrian Kurds whom the USA has been backing in the fight against the Islamic State.
The government’s main focus has been to consolidate its grip over the main cities of western Syria and the coastal region that is the ancestral homeland of Assad’s Alawite sect.
Late Thursday intense air raids battered the area.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights estimates several thousand rebel fighters remain in the al-Waer district.
The JIM is to report on chemical attacks in three towns: Zafr Zita, in Hama province, on April 28, 2014, and on two villages in Idlib: Qmenas on March 16, 2015 and Binnish on March 24, 2015. Thursday’s meeting of the International Syria Support Group comes after the two blamed each other for spoiling the country’s cease-fire that they had agreed to only two weeks before. A senior United Nations official held out hope that the truce could be reestablished.
“Absent a major gesture like this, we don’t believe there is a point to making more promises or issuing more plans or announcing something that can’t be reached”, Kerry said, describing a “moment of truth” for Syria, Russia and all those trying to halt the bloodshed.
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“That is the objective of the meeting of the ISSG”. He called for the U.N.to expand its terrorism list to include groups at the fringes of a US -backed rebel umbrella group and called Washington’s errant strike an “outrageous violation”. This news story is related to Latest/151827-Aleppo-hit-by-worst-strikes-for-months-as-Putin-Assad-ignore-US-plea/ – breaking news, latest news, pakistan ne.
