France’s envoy to the United Nations asserted Sunday that war crimes were being committed in Syria’s battered city of Aleppo, as the Security Council met for urgent talks on the escalating military campaign.
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Following the collapse of a short-lived, USA and Russia-brokered ceasefire, Syrian forces pounded rebel-held eastern Aleppo on Sunday, killing at least 85 people and wounding more than 300 others, an activist group reported.
He said that Russian Federation and the Syrian regime were also using so-called bunker busting bombs – created to penetrate the earth and destroy underground targets – against residential areas.
The US ambassador to the UN, Samantha Power, said Russia’s action in Syria was barbarism, not counter-terrorism.
Earlier the Russian Foreign Ministry hit back at Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson after he warned Moscow would be guilty of committing war crimes if its warplanes were deliberating striking civilian targets.
He said Russia’s air force may have deliberately targeted the civilian convoy on September 19, killing 20 people. U.S. officials blamed Russia, while Moscow denied that Russian or Syrian warplanes were responsible.
Hospitals are overwhelmed with casualties and medical workers are expecting numerous wounded to die from a lack of treatment, according to Mohammad Zein Khandaqani, a member of the Medical Council, which oversees medical affairs in the city’s opposition quarters.
“We now hear of bunker-busting bombs being used and see pictures of large craters in the earth much larger than in previous aerial bombings”, he said, adding that the systematic indiscriminate use of such weapons in areas where civilians and civilian infrastructure are present is confirmed, it may amount to war crimes.
The organization said Sunday it had reached 60,000 residents trapped in the towns of Madaya, Zabadani, Foua, and Kafraya.
Russian Federation had deployed more military resources into the Syrian war than the United States, for whom the conflict was less of a strategic consideration, giving Russian Federation and its Syrian ally the upper hand on the battlefield, he said.
“Negotiations under the present conditions are no longer useful and are meaningless”, the statement said.
“The burden is on Russian Federation to prove it is willing and able to take extraordinary steps to salvage diplomatic efforts”, France, Italy, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the USA said in a statement.
A ceasefire between the Syrian Government and rebel forces collapsed last week when an aid convoy was bombed.
“When it comes to instances such as the bombing of civilian targets in Aleppo, we should be looking at whether or not that targeting is done in the knowledge that those are wholly innocent civilian targets”.
At the start of that meeting the U.N.’s top envoy to Syria accused the government of unleashing “unprecedented military violence” against civilians in Aleppo. “That is a war crime”.
The barrel bombs, launched from helicopters, struck the city’s Bustan al-Pasha neighborhood, according to the Aleppo Media Center, an opposition-affiliated group of activists which works to document the conflict.
Several rebel factions succeeded on Sunday to retake the strategic Handarat camp for Palestinian refugees in the northern province of Aleppo, just a day after the Syrian army and Palestinian fighters wrested control over it.
Schwalger said New Zealand recognised that those opposed to the rule of President Bashar al-Assad also had responsibilities, and countries with influence on the opposition needing to encourage respect for the ceasefire and the disassociation with terrorist groups. “Russian Federation is partnering with the Syrian regime to carry out war crimes”. Rebels say Russian warplanes are responsible for numerous air strikes in the city. “We are running out of fuel, we are working with very little electricity”, pediatrician Tiem Shamy told The Globe and Mail from the hospital in the rebel-held eastern sector of the city.
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Rebel forces lost control of the camp to advancing regime troops over the weekend after coming intensive airstrikes but retook the area in fighting late on Saturday night.
