The Syrian army has announced the start of a new military offensive in the rebel-held city of Aleppo.
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Convoys have repeatedly been blocked for security reasons, refusals by the Syrian regime to grant authorization and strict conditions imposed by opposition groups.
In a statement on its official website, the ministry “called on residents to stay away from the positions of terrorist groups”.
The U.S. began an air war in Syria in September 2014 against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, and Russian Federation began one in September 2015 to shore up Bashar Assad’s regime against opposition rebels.
A “minister” in Syria’s opposition government was among at least 12 people killed in a vehicle bomb attack in the south of the country yesterday, the body’s spokesman said.
Kerry proposed that the way forward “out of the carnage” would be a ban on Syrian government forces flying over areas controlled by the opposition.
An estimated 250,000 civilians live in Aleppo’s eastern quarters.
The Syrian Arab Red Crescent, which supervised the delivery, said the convoy covers the needs of 7,000 families, and another convoy to support 5,000 more will soon follow.
“We are sending today an inter-agency convoy that will cross conflict lines into a besieged area of rural Damascus”, said Jens Laerke, spokesman of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). “The food will be expiring on Monday”, the head of the United Nations humanitarian taskforce for Syria, Jan Egeland, told reporters in Geneva.
Yet as the trucks were being unloaded, “the place turned into hell, and fighter jets were in the sky”, said the White Helmets civil defense group’s Aleppo director in a video.
The UN has said it is ready to resume aid convoys in Syria after halting operations in response to a deadly attack on an aid mission on Monday.
Speaking in NY where he has been attending the United Nations, he urged the Russians to end the conflict by forcing their ally, Syrian president Bashar Assad, to the negotiating table. Moscow has that Russian or Syrian warplanes carried out the attack.
US Secretary of State John Kerry meanwhile called for all military aircraft in Syria to be grounded in the wake of the aid convoy attack.
“It was a long, painful, hard and disappointing meeting”, the U.N. Syria envoy Staffan de Mistura told reporters after the meeting of the International Syria Support Group, which includes about two dozen major and regional powers.
Instead, the two-hour discussion served as a warm-up act for Thursday’s meeting.
Kerry also angrily condemned Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Levrov’s call for an investigation into an attack against a United Nations aid convoy, insisting that everyone knows it was Russia’s fault already and that Russia is trying to invent facts.
“The first thing that we have to do is find a way to restore credibility to the process, if that can be done”, he said, of attempts to restore the ceasefire.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry told reporters Thursday he was “frustrated” that the cease-fire inside Syria, brokered last week by Russian Federation and the United States, had fallen apart but said he was “no less determined today than I was yesterday” to restore the cease-fire.
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The Obama administration pledged that if the truce held for seven days and humanitarian supplies were delivered, it would join with Russian Federation in launching airstrikes against Syrian rebel forces deemed to be “terrorists”.
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