Defence Minister Marise Payne on Monday dismissed any connection between the ill-fated airstrike and the recently relaxed rules of engagement for Australia’s combat operations in the region, with attacks now permitted for a wider range of targets including non-combat positions.
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The Syrian army said in a statement last week that the seven-day truce ends at midnight Sunday.
Despite largely holding, the cease-fire has been repeatedly violated by both sides, and aid convoys have not reached besieged rebel-held neighborhoods of Aleppo, Syria’s largest city and one-time commercial center, which has been the center of violence in recent months.
The war of words reveals the fragile state of relations between Russian Federation and the West despite both sides saying a combined approach is needed to defeat the IS threat.
“These strikes endanger everything that has been done so far by the global community” to end the conflict, foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said.
The Syrian military said the deadly coalition airstrike hit a base in Deir el-Zour that was surrounded by IS, allowing the extremists to advance and overrun Syrian army positions in the area.
“This might put in danger this Joint Implementation Center that the United States and the Russians are supposed to set up in the next few days to coordinate just these kinds of strikes against ISIS and to prevent just what happened”, he said Saturday.
The Syrian Foreign Ministry called the USA -led coalition airstrikes a “dangerous and blatant aggression against the Syrian Arab Republic and its army”.
“We strongly urge Washington to exert the needed pressure on the illegal armed groups under its patronage to implement the ceasefire plan unconditionally”. He said the US has not even tried to get the opposition to hold its fire.
With Valdimir Putin’s Russian Federation engaged in a proxy tussle with the US-led Western alliance for influence and for the moral high-ground in the long-running civil war in Syria, Saturday’s ill-directed airstrikes have become a public relations gift for Mr Putin as he seeks to depict the U.S. attacks on Islamic State as also being directed at the Moscow-backed Assad regime in Damascus.
Moscow stepped up its war of words with Washington on Sunday, saying air strikes by a USA -led coalition on the Syrian army threatened the implementation of a U.S.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which monitors the Syrian conflict now in its sixth year, said the pilot of the MiG Syrian warplane was killed.
The US has expressed regret for the strikes, saying that they were meant to target ISIS militants and that if they struck Syrian troops it was accidental.
Under the deal, the United States and Russian Federation are aiming for reduced violence over seven consecutive days before they move to the next stage of coordinating military strikes against the former Nusra Front and Islamic State, which are not party to the truce.
Iran is a close ally of Syrian President Bashar Assad, and has sent high-ranking officers and other military forces to bolster his troops.
The Americans “not only turned out to be unable to give an adequate explanation of what happened, but also tried, as is their custom, to turn everything upside down”, the statement said.
A senior White House official said the United States has relayed “regret” through the Russian government for the unintentional loss of life to Syrian forces.
The Observatory said at least 30 jihadists were killed in the counterattack by the army. It called the incident a serious and blatant aggression, SANA reported.
Meanwhile, truckloads of humanitarian aid destined for the beleaguered city of Aleppo remained stuck on the Turkish border on Sunday, with the United Nations saying it was waiting for guarantees from both Syrian rebels and government forces for safe passage. Tens of thousands of people live in government-held neighborhoods of Deir el-Zour under the siege of IS fighters.
Under the cease-fire agreement announced by Kerry and his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, in Geneva a week ago, hostilities should have paused Monday, when the Muslim world marked the beginning of the Eid al-Adha holiday. In particular, fighting erupted between rebels and pro-government forces in the opposition-held suburb of Eastern Ghouta, near Damascus, and airstrikes hit several towns in the central province of Homs.
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The Observatory and Ahmad al-Masalmeh, an opposition activist based in the southern province of Daraa, said government helicopter gunships dropped barrel bombs on the village of Dael, killing six and wounding a large number of people.
