In a rare interview in Damascus, the President denied the rebel-held half of Aleppo is under siege.
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The Associated Press sat down with Syrian President Bashar Assad at a palace in downtown Damascus.
Syrian regime leader Bashar al-Assad said in an interview with AP News broadcast on Thursday that Syria’s war will “drag on” as long as it is funded and interfered in by other countries.
“Australian forces, Coalition forces, in that particular operation believed they were targeting units of Daesh fighters, units of ISIL”, he said. The U.S. -based Physicians for Human Rights recorded 382 attacks on medical facilities and hospitals throughout Syria since the start of the conflict in 2011.
Instead, Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, who negotiated the truce two weeks ago, went their separate ways as violence in Syria flared up anew and the relationship between the two key foreign powers in the conflict appeared to reach a new low.
Syria and the United States have been at loggerheads since an airstrike by the US -led coalition that hit Syrian troops in the eastern province of Deir el-Zour on Saturday.
Republican Senator John McCain, the committee’s chairman, fiercely criticized the possibility of future cooperation and called U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, who brokered the ill-fated deal, “delusional” for seeking it.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said the Syrian opposition needed to take steps toward a compromise.
“What is more the aircraft entered the area over the town of Orum al-Kubra, where the convoy was located, several minutes before it burst into flames and left 30 minutes later”, he said.
US officials initially said the aircraft that dropped the bombs were Russian Su-24 fighter jets, but they weren’t sure if the aircraft were piloted by Russian or Syrian government troops.
The attack on the aid convoy came on the same day as the Syrian military announced that a one-week truce brokered by the US and Russian Federation was over.
US officials believe Russian aircraft were responsible for the strike, but Moscow has denied involvement and the Russian Defence Ministry said on Wednesday a US Predator drone was in the area when the convoy was attacked.
“Those convoys were in the area and in the control of the terrorists”. So, we don’t have any idea about what happened.
According to Kerry, Syrian regime is hitting opposition groups under the cover of fighting against extremist groups. However, as NPR’s Alison Meuse reported, an eyewitness said that “the attack consisted of helicopters and warplanes”.
When first asked if Russian Federation bombed the aid convoy, Dunford said it wasn’t certain which aircraft dropped the bombs.
Russian Federation had previously suggested that the convoy was destroyed by a fire on the ground, not by air strikes.
Ramzy Ramzy, the top deputy to United Nations envoy Staffan de Mistura, said: “We did not say that”.
In April, the United Nations special envoy for Syria estimated that 400,000 people have died in the Syrian war.
She added that “another monitor found that in one six-month period at the beginning of 2015, the regime killed almost 8,000 civilians”.
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Washington has said that it does not conduct air strikes over Aleppo. And, in unusually blunt language, they illustrated why they’ve been unable for more than five years to stop Syria’s civil war.
