The UN suspended all aid convoys in Syria in the wake of the attack.
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US Secretary of State John Kerry wants all aircraft grounded over Syria. “The drivers are sleeping at the border, and they have done that now for a week”, United Nations humanitarian adviser Jan Egeland told reporters in Geneva.
The U.N. Security Council has taken up Syria’s civil war as a temporary truce unravels and worldwide tensions rise.
“Are we supposed to sit there and have happy talks in Geneva when you’ve signed up to a ceasefire and you don’t adhere to it?”
“The eyewitnesses will tell you what happened”, Kerry said, in a direct confrontation with Russian Federation of a kind rarely seen at the Security Council since the Cold War.
Dunford said that, even if the USA military were to cooperate with Russian Federation in Syria, it would not be sharing intelligence. Instead, the two-hour discussion served as a warm-up act for a Thursday meeting blocks away in NY that will include Kerry, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and their counterparts from more than a dozen European and Arab countries.
The top USA military officer told Congress on Thursday that he believes Russian Federation bombed a humanitarian aid convoy in Syria earlier this week, killing 20 civilians in an “unacceptable atrocity”, as the bitter feud between the two nations over the five-year Syrian civil war escalated further.
There was still hope for an agreement, Mr Mistura added, saying that the U.S. and Russian Federation had “a responsibility”. Formally it applies to all aircraft that might fly over “key areas”, including those flown by the United States and its partners, but the intent is to prevent airstrikes by Syrian and Russian planes.
However, Kerry says he still believes there is a way forward “out of the carnage” in Syria. He stressed that Moscow has presented many distorted versions of the deadly attack on the aid convoy that has included everything from claims of a justifiable counter-terror strike to vehicles spontaneously combusting.
Russia’s military spokesman Igor Konashenkov said a coalition attack drone was over the area of the aid convoy.
‘To add insult to injury our soldiers and the wounded soldiers underwent another airstrike by drones while they were evacuating their positions, ‘ Dr al-Ja’afari said.
It was one of Kerry’s most bitter exchanges with Moscow as secretary of state, laced with invective and outrage.
Russian Federation has waged a yearlong air campaign in Syria that has shored up President Bashar Assad and allowed his troops to seize some key ground.
Kerry’s words came immediately after Lavrov’s own barbs, underscoring a breakdown in trust since the pair sealed the cease-fire agreement and potential U.S.
But the ceasefire’s collapse has stalled aid deliveries. US-led coalition jets, including a team from Australia, killed more than 60 people in a strike deemed “an accident” by the Pentagon.
He denied government forces had deliberately bombed hospitals in rebel-held areas, said the siege was a fiction and that only a minority were complaining.
Bashar al-Assad has denied his forces are besieging the rebel-held areas of Aleppo, stating that “people would dead by now” and insisting they had “everything” they needed.
“Syria will not become another Libya or Iraq”, he said.
Ibrahim Alhaj, a member of the volunteer first responders known as the Syria Civil Defense, said 24 people were killed in the Aleppo strikes.
Kerry called for all warplanes to halt flights over aid routes, while Lavrov suggested a possible three-day pause in fighting to get the truce back on track.
Ban Ki-moon said, “We are at a make or break moment”.
Trucks will start rolling to some areas but “carefully and cautiously”, the United Nations envoy to Syria Staffan di Mistura told the BBC. Al-Moufti initially said that five medics were killed.
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“I expect this to be confrontational”, Graham said.
