At the same time, Assad denied any Syrian or Russian involvement in the attack on a humanitarian aid convoy outside Aleppo on Monday.
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“It was the heaviest air strikes for months inside Aleppo city”, said Rami Abdulrahman, director of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights which monitors the conflict from Britain.
Mr Assad also ridiculed concern about the army’s use of barrel bombs, saying: “What’s the difference between different kinds of bombs?”
“Can you hear it?” The neighbourhood is getting hit right now by missiles.
An AFP news agency journalist reports that his entire street in the southern Bustan al-Qasr district was left burning after warplanes dropped incendiary bombs.
“I woke up to a powerful quake, though I was in a place far away from where the missile landed”, he said in a voice recording sent to reporters. His group had “martyrs under the rubble” in three locations.
The Syrian Army has announced a new offensive in the rebel-held east of Aleppo, days after a week-long ceasefire crumbled.
Two of those centers, the volunteers say, were put out of service. “It’s clear that the Russians will not do this”, Mutasem Alsyofi of the Syrian Civil Society Declaration Initiative told Reuters in NY.
“Military operations include everything, and of course the most important part is the ground operation”, the source said.
Russian and Syrian military officials didn’t issue an official statement about Friday’s airstrikes.
Earlier, the United States and Russian Federation failed to agree on how to revive a short-lived ceasefire in Syria during what the UN Syria mediator called a “long, painful, hard and disappointing” meeting on Thursday. Around 250,000 people in the city are facing severe shortages as a result of a government siege. Before the war, the city held almost 3 million people and was Syria’s economic hub.
President Bashar Assad rejected United States accusations that Syrian or Russian planes struck an aid convoy in Aleppo or that his troops were preventing food from entering the city’s rebel-held eastern neighborhoods.
Throughout the day, warplanes pounded eastern Aleppo.
The Syrian Civil Defence Force, also known as the White Helmets, claimed that three out of four of its rescue centres had been hit by Syrian government air strikes.
When asked what would happen next if the process completely collapsed, the official said it was something the United States was “giving a lot of thought to”. “Today the bombardment is more violent, with a larger number of planes”.
He refuted USA claims that Russian Federation was responsible for bombing a United Nations aid convoy on Monday and denied that his government was bombing civilians. It’s about the United States and the terrorist groups that have been affiliated to ISIS and al-Nusra and al-Qaida, and to the United States and to Turkey and to Saudi Arabia.
In New York, smartly-dressed world leaders launch a war of words over a short-lived ceasefire in Syria. Aleppo and its surrounding areas were pummeled by regime airstrikes from Wednesday through Friday, activists with the opposition-aligned Aleppo Media Center (AMC) told CNN.
Still, U.N. peace envoy Staffan de Mistura said somewhat vaguely: “The Russians, in my opinion, were genuine when they negotiated with the Americans”.
Kerry had yesterday at a press briefing said that the U.S. has exchanged ideas with the Russian Federation and plan to consult them with respect to those ideas.
In another sign of the Syrian government’s determination to press on with seizing and holding territory, it evacuated more rebel fighters from the last opposition-held district of Homs, which would complete the government’s recapture of the central city, now largely reduced to ruins.
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Kerry has called for the grounding of aircraft over key aid routes, a proposal that Moscow has described as unworkable.
