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At least 12 dead in attack on aid convoy in Syria
There were no independent reports of civilian deaths on the government side since the cease-fire came into effect.
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Egeland added, “It is outrageous that it was hit while offloading at warehouses”.
A United Nations humanitarian aid convoy in Syria was hit by airstrikes Monday as the Syrian military declared that a U.S.
The attack came just hours after the government there declared a ceasefire was over.
Officials said the strikes killed more than 60 soldiers.
A senior military source in Damascus told AFP that the truce would expire at 7pm (4pm GMT) Monday, if no extension was announced.
On September 13, four days after the Lavrov-Kerry deal was unveiled, John Kirby, a spokesperson of the US State Department, said that the US has not changed its policy on Syria, in other words that the White House was not ready to work with Assad.
The military said insurgents had failed to adhere to the agreement.
If the cease-fire and aid movement had been successful, the US and Russian Federation had planned to work together against extremists in Syria. We need to see where we are, and then we’ll make a judgment.
Kirby noted that the cease-fire arrangement was agreed to by the United States and Russian Federation, which is responsible for the compliance of the Assad government.
Plans to evacuate several hundred rebels from the last opposition-held district of Homs city have also overshadowed the agreement, with rebels saying it would amount to the government declaring the ceasefire over.
Soon after, the USA said it’s prepared to extend the fractured ceasefire despite numerous violations and the Syrian military’s announcement.
Syria’s military announced the end to the truce, accusing rebels of more than 300 violations and failing to “commit to a single element” of the US-Russia deal.
In a statement, the Russian Foreign Ministry expressed its concern over the U.S. air raids and demanded, what they described as, their American partners to conduct a full investigation and consider strict measures to avoid the recurrence of such an event.
“Despite continued attacks by the regime on opposition positions, we have witnessed a measure of reduced violence over the last week”, Kirby said.
The International Committee of the Red Cross says it has delivered humanitarian aid to the besieged town of Talbiseh in Syria’s central Homs province.
Asked whether he expected aid to reach rebel-held areas of eastern Aleppo, he said: “There is no hope”.
United Nations peace envoy Staffan de Mistura said all participants at Tuesday’s meeting reconfirmed support for the truce, even if Assad’s military and the rebels weren’t always respecting it. “We have not had seven days of calm and of delivery of humanitarian goods”, Kerry said.
“The cease-fire is not dead”, Kerry insisted.
United Nations aid chief Stephen O’Brien said he was “deeply concerned” by the incident and called on “all parties to the conflict, once again, to take all necessary measures to protect humanitarian actors, civilians, and civilian infrastructure as required by global humanitarian law”.
The Syrian military said in a statement on Monday that “armed terrorist groups” repeatedly violated the ceasefire and took advantage of the truce to mobilise and arm themselves while attacking government-held areas.
“The truce was supposed to be a real chance to stop the bloodshed, but the armed terrorist groups flouted this agreement”, Monday’s army statement said.
He said United States and Russian officials were meeting in Geneva on Monday to discuss developments.
American officials said, however, that conditions were still not right for US-Russian military co-operation.
Still, the Syrian declaration was another signal that the diplomatic effort to halt the conflict, which has killed an estimated 500,000 people since 2011, was verging on failure. The two countries had agreed that completion of a successful seven-day ceasefire would mark the starting point of greater military coordination against ISIS and other militant groups.
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While Arab, European and other officials waited, Kerry and Lavrov met in a NY hotel to iron out some of their many differences, including a mistaken weekend air raid by the American-led coalition on Syrian soldiers and a deadly attack on an aid convoy that the USA blamed on Russian Federation and Syria, despite denials from Moscow and Damascus.