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France demands Syrian government ground planes

Rebel officials and rescue workers said incendiary bombs were among the weapons that rained from the sky on the city.

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“We can’t go out to the world and say we have an agreement when we don’t, nor can we tell our partners that there is a cessation when there isn’t”.

Ammar al-Selmo, the head of the local civil defence rescue service, or the White Helmets, said five jets he identified as Russian began a fresh wave of bombing at around 6am.

Speaking with reporters after the meeting, Kerry acknowledged the current strategy wasn’t working, even as he vowed to to press on with efforts to find a peaceful solution to the war between Syrian President Bashar Assad’s Russian-backed government and US -backed rebels.

After the meeting broke up, Mr Kerry said he was ready to meet Mr Lavrov again to see if anything could be done.

Also on Thursday, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad denied claims that he was responsible for the ongoing fighting.

Moscow and Washington announced the ceasefire with fanfare on September 9.

But the collapse of that ceasefire – the same fate as all previous efforts to halt a 5-1/2-year-old war that has killed hundreds of thousands of Syrians – appears to have already doomed the peace bid, probably the last chance for a settlement during Barack Obama’s presidency.

The top U.S. diplomat insisted that the USA demands Syrian aircraft stop flying in a strategic zone controlled by the opposition. Washington said it hit Syrian forces by mistake. Assad said in his interview he believed the strikes, which he said lasted over an hour, were deliberate.

Russian and Syrian military officials didn’t issue an official statement about Friday’s airstrikes. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring body gave an initial death toll of 27.

Aleppo, once Syria’s commercial and industrial hub, has been divided roughly in two since 2012, with the government controlling the west and rebels the east. Before the war, the city held almost 3 million people and was Syria’s economic hub.

Fighter aircraft pounded the rebel-held parts of Aleppo on Friday after the Syrian Army declared an offensive, Reuters reported.

Mr de Mistura said: “The good news is that Russian Federation and the United States agreed to work intensely on a possible restoration of it”.

He blamed unnamed other parties among the delegates for “undermining” the US-Russian initiative and added “they are still trying, so declaring it dead would be wrong”. -Russian brokered truce took effect.

More than 300,000 people have been killed in Syria since the conflict began with anti-government protests in March 2011. It has been a focal point of clashes between the Syrian army and the rebels.

The week in NY is heading towards disastrous diplomatic failure, he adds. A senior United Nations official held out hope that the truce could be reestablished.

“The renewal of the cessation of hostilities, the resumption of aid deliveries, the isolation of Nusra [Front] and Daesh [Islamic State / IS / ISIS] and the beginning of a negotiating path” were named by the USA top diplomat as the essential ingredients for “restoration of a united Syria.” .

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“That is the objective of the meeting of the ISSG”.

Airstrike on Syrian troops was intentional Bashar Assad says