Warplanes mounted the heaviest air strikes in months against rebel-held districts of the city of Aleppo overnight, as Russian Federation and the Syrian government spurned a USA plea to halt flights, burying any hope for the revival of a doomed ceasefire.
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“I woke up to a powerful quake though I was in a place far away from where the missile landed”, he said in a voice recording sent to Reuters.
Kerry had yesterday at a press briefing said that the United States has exchanged ideas with the Russian Federation and plan to consult them with respect to those ideas.
The Syrian regime announced the start of a new offensive on the city of Aleppo Thursday, ignoring calls to stop bombing civilians, a senior administration official told Fox News Thursday.
Mr Kerry said he would wait for Mr Lavrov to tell him on Friday if Russian Federation would suspend air strikes for a significant period of time.
The Syrian military could not immediately be reached for comment on Friday, and officials have yet to confirm casualty figures.
The UN has now delivered medical supplies to the rebel-held suburb of Moadamiya in the capital and hopes to travel to Aleppo and other parts of Syria in the near future.
Secretary of State John Kerry was informed of the Syrian military’s decision to restart operations in Aleppo when his chief of staff showed him a headline on his BlackBerry during a meeting of the International Syrian Support Group on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly in NY. “What’s happening now is annihilation in every sense of the word”, he told Reuters.
The ancient city, which has become both a symbol of resistance and the high price that civilians are paying in the war, has been carved into rebel- and government-controlled areas since 2012. “Today the bombardment is more violent, with a larger number of planes”.
“We have four centres in eastern Aleppo”.
Foreign ministers emerged from a meeting in NY having failed to find a way back to a ceasefire, though the United State’s Kerry said he was willing to keep trying if Russian Federation came back with new ideas.
In an extensive interview in Damascus, the president also predicted the five-year civil war would “drag on” due to what he claimed was continued external backing for his opponents. He called for the U.N.to expand its terrorism list to include groups at the fringes of a US -backed rebel umbrella group and called Washington’s errant strike an “outrageous violation”.
World leaders, including the United States and Turkey, have quietly walked back their calls for Assad’s immediate departure, focusing instead on fighting the Islamic State group, which flourished in the chaos of the country’s conflict.
While Mr Kerry and Mr Lavrov were set to hold more talks on Friday, even confidence-building measures seemed beyond their reach at this point.
United Nations envoy Staffan de Mistura warned: “What is happening is Aleppo is under attack and everyone is going back to the conflict”. The top USA military official told Congress on Thursday that he disagrees with Kerry’s proposal to ground all warplanes.
Russia’s Defense Ministry followed by saying the aid convoy was accompanied by militants in a pickup truck with a mortar, Kerry said, adding that no such evidence exists.
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Amid widespread disagreement Thursday between Washington and Moscow and internal dissent within the Obama administration over how or even if to proceed, Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov convened what diplomats expected to be a fractious meeting of the roughly 20 nations that have declared interests in Syria.
