The Russian government on Tuesday denied that its military or that of Syrian President Bashar Assad were responsible for an attack on an aid convoy near Aleppo that killed several humanitarian workers.
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Britain backed global condemnation of the strike, which came hours after Syria ended a week-old ceasefire.
All UN aid convoys have been suspended after an air strike on Monday.
The Syrian Red Crescent said the head of one of its local offices and “around 20 civilians” had been killed, although other death tolls differed.
Aid officials said the convoy was hit as it unloaded food at a warehouse in opposition controlled Orem al-Kubra.
The attack occurred shortly after a ceasefire agreement between the Syrian regime and rebels seeking to oust President Bashar al-Assad, which was meant to allow the passage of humanitarian aid, broke down amid renewed fighting.
Damaged trucks carrying aid in Aleppo, Syria, after a deadly air strike.
The UN says over six million Syrians are living in besieged or hard-to-reach areas and require humanitarian aid.
Russian Federation and Syria have both insisted that their forces were not involved. It had occurred at the same time as militants from the group formerly called the Nusra Front had started a big offensive in nearby Aleppo, he said, appearing to point the finger at rescue workers from a group called the “White Helmets” who filmed the aftermath. It also comes just days after the United States said it was likely that it and several other aircraft in its coalition had mistakenly hit Syrian soldiers in an airstrike.
The International Committee of the Red Cross said that around 20 civilians were killed in the attack, as well as the director of the Red Crescent’s Urum al-Kubra branch, Omar Barakat.
“Yesterday’s attack is a flagrant violation of global humanitarian law and it isunacceptable”, Peter Maurer, president of the worldwide Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said in a statement. “The deliberate targeting of humanitarian personnel is a flagrant violation of worldwide law, and totally morally unacceptable”, he said.
Echoing those remarks, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon referenced the attacks earlier today during the opening of the General Assembly’s annual general debate, emphasizing that the crisis in Syria is “taking the greatest number of lives and sowing the widest instability”.
The head of the United Nations agency that coordinates aid, Stephen O’Brien, said the attack would amount to a war crime if it were found to have targeted humanitarian aid workers.
At least 39 civilians were killed in overnight bombardment of Aleppo and the surrounding province, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group said, and fresh clashes erupted on the city’s southern edges.
“Many groups have killed many innocents – but none more so than the government of Syria, which continues to barrel bomb neighborhoods and systematically torture thousands of detainees”.
The messages show United Nations officials chose to proceed even though the Syrian regime was violating the cease-fire-violations United Nations officials have been reticent to acknowledge publicly even as they did so in private messages.
But Syria’s army said the seven-day truce period had ended.
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Aleppo was Syria’s largest city and its economic heartland before the conflict, but has seen some of the worst fighting between rebels and government forces in a battle observers say will determine the outcome of the war. “This area is full of civilians, it’s residential”, Badawi said. But the participants agreed they should do everything possible to salvage the deal brokered by the US and Russian Federation.
