If the cessation held for seven continuous days, the US military would begin to cooperate with Russian forces to target the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria and al Qaeda, in a bid to reduce Russian support for the Assad regime and work toward an eventual political solution. Assad, in an interview with AP News, said that Russian Federation was not behind it and suggested that “militants” and “terrorists” were to blame.
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Assad said the aerial bombardment wasn’t in error, claiming that it involved four planes and lasted more than an hour.
The U.S. began an air war in Syria in September 2014 against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, and Russian Federation began one in September 2015 to shore up Bashar Assad’s regime against opposition rebels.
Kerry’s calls to ground flights come weeks after the US defense department said it wanted less flights in the region, but refused to call it a no-fly zone. Turkey sees the Kurds as a long-term political threat.
In his address to the Security Council, Lavrov declared on Wednesday that there would be “no more unilateral pauses” by Syrian government forces, arguing that opposition fighters on the ground had previously used those ceasefires to regroup.
Dunford and Defense Secretary Ash Carter faced Republicans angry that the Obama administration is not taking more aggressive steps to end the 5-year-old-civil war in Syria. Sen. “I believe that the United States is not genuine regarding having a cessation of violence in Syria”, he said.
In an interview with The Associated Press, Syrian President Bashar Assad blamed the USA for the collapse of a fragile cease-fire earlier this week and denied carrying out well-documented human rights abuses, such as besieging civilians or using chemical weapons against them. However, as The Guardian has reported, aid organizations “are refusing to share Global Positioning System coordinates with Russian and Syrian authorities because of repeated attacks on medical facilities and workers”.
The Syrian leader claimed that the United States “doesn’t have the will” to collaborate with Russian Federation on battling Islamic militants in Syria, which was one of the key aspects of the failed ceasefire agreement.
Recriminations over the attack the next day, on a convoy delivering aid to a rebel held area in Syria’s north, are still reverberating around the world.
A senior USA administration official said the U.S. believes with a very high degree of confidence that a Russian-piloted aircraft carried out the strike. The official wasn’t authorized to discuss the issue publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.
The resumption was also announced by the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), the global body’s aid agency, which said in a statement Wednesday: “The preparation for these convoys has now resumed and we are ready to deliver aid to besieged and hard-to-reach areas as soon as possible”.
“It was either the Russians or the regime”, he said.
– On the U.S.’s credibility with regards to Syria’s war: “I would say whatever the American officials said about the conflicts in Syria in general has no credibility”.
This was the first convoy to head towards a besieged area since Monday’s attack, Laerke told reported.
Kerry’s proposal to halt all flights was met with disagreement both in Moscow and even in Washington. Like Syria, Russia has denied carrying out the convoy bombing.
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The United States and Russian Federation have been leading diplomatic efforts to negotiate a lasting ceasefire and have been discussing how to coordinate attacks on militants from the Islamic State and the group formally known as the Nusra Front.
