The new government push came as the United Nations said that almost 2 million people in Aleppo, Syria’s largest city and onetime commercial center, are without running water following the escalation in fighting over the past few days. -Russian talks failed to revive a cease-fire.
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While intra-Syria negotiations remain the aim of the Western powers and Russian Federation, a broad coalition of 33 Syrian rebel factions issued a statement Sunday saying: “Negotiations under the present conditions are no longer useful and are meaningless”.
U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Samantha Power also blasted Moscow’s involvement in the carnage, reports CBS News’ Pamela Falk.
“The first thing that we have to do is find a way to restore credibility to the process, if that can be done”, Kerry said of the effort to rescue the truce.
Negotiations are underway, it says, to fix a water pumping station and get water flowing back to the city.
He focused in particular on reports of the use of so-called “bunker-busting bombs” that are created to target underground structures.
Ban urged all parties involved to “work harder for an end to the nightmare”.
The Syrian defence ministry has called on residents to move to government-held areas, adding there would be “no detention, or inquiry to any citizen” who reached the checkpoints that divide the city.
UNICEF said the loss of mains supply posed serious health risks in rebel-held areas as the only alternative source of drinking water was from highly contaminated wells. The U.N. estimates 600,000 Syrians are trapped in different sieges.
The statement came after Russian and regime airstrikes killed forty five civilians on Friday including several children in eastern Aleppo.
Syrian army jets have launched more than 150 air strikes on eastern Aleppo in the last 24 hours, killing at least 90 people in the northern city and its countryside, according to residents.
The Syrian Center for Policy Research, a Beirut-based NGO, has put the death toll from the six-year-old conflict at more than 470,000. There were no reported casualties among the group’s volunteers.
Damascus and allies including Shiite militia from Iran, Iraq and Lebanon have encircled rebel-held areas of Aleppo gradually this year, achieving their long-held objective of fully besieging the area this summer with Russian air support.
“A so-called military solution is impossible including in Aleppo”, he stressed.
Intense air strikes toppled buildings and killed at least 45 civilians in Aleppo on Saturday, two days after the Syrian army announced an offensive to retake the rebel-held east of the city.
They denounced the “fire-bombing and shelling” as well as the “deliberate targeting” of a humanitarian convoy last week and the “cutting off of water supplies to the majority of civilians still in the city”.
De Mistura said U.S.
Russia’s Foreign Ministry took a slap at Boris Johnson for his suggestion that Russian Federation has committed war crimes. All this is right except for two words: “Instead of “Russia” it needs to be “Great Britain” and instead of ‘Syria, ‘ ‘Iraq'”.
He said water was being used as a weapon of war by all sides.
Johnson said Sunday that Russian air power may have deliberately targeted the civilian convoy on September 19.
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But he said the United States needs Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s government and his chief ally, Russia, to “do their part”.
