Syria’s ceasefire was on the brink of collapsing on Sunday after a US-led coalition strike killed dozens of regime soldiers and Aleppo city was hit by its first raids in almost a week.
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The cease-fire deal is now threatened with a recent escalation between Moscow and Washington, after the US-led coaliton airstrikes killed 90 Syrian servicemen in the eastern province of Deir al-Zour on Saturday.
There is no immediate indication that the truce will be extended.
The UN says aid trucks that had been expected to move to Aleppo on Sunday morning were once again being delayed. Witnesses say the fragile truce has been repeatedly violated.
The seven-day cease-fire was supposed to end at midnight Sunday, according to a Syrian army statement issued last week. Churkin said Russian Federation had no “specific evidence” of the United States colluding with Islamic State militants. Russian Defence Ministry’s spokesperson Major General Igor Konashenkov, said in an emailed statement to the Associated Press news agency that “opposition and terrorists” are using the ceasefire to “boost their forces and prepare for renewed hostilities”.
Russian Federation has warned that the incident puts a “very big question mark” over the future of a precarious ceasefire agreed by Washington and Moscow, and a strongly worded foreign ministry statement on Sunday said that the strikes were “on the boundary between criminal negligence and direct connivance with Islamic State terrorists”.
A correspondent in Aleppo’s Karam Al Jabal district saw several wounded children after a raid.
The U.S. Central Command said that the coalition’s intended targets were ISIS fighters, and that the strike was “halted immediately” once U.S. forces were informed by Russian Federation “that it was possible the personnel and vehicles targeted were part of the Syrian military”.
Moscow also blames the strike, which killed up to 80 Syrian troops, on America’s “stubborn refusal” to co-operate.
“None of the facts on the ground show that what happened was a mistake or a coincidence”, Buthaina Shaaban said.
The Syrian army has been fighting off an ISIL offensive around the key Deir Ezzour airbase since a year ago.
He said the strikes enabled IS to “immediately” take over the army position on a strategic hill near the eastern city of Deir Ezzor. Syrian state media confirmed the incident, saying that an air force pilot had been killed.
Syria’s armed forces said coalition aircraft hit a Syrian military position near the Deir Ezzor airport in the country’s east, in what appears to have been the first time coalition forces have hit a Syrian regime target.
“These strikes endanger everything that has been done so far by the worldwide community” to end the conflict, Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said.
“The actions of the coalition pilots-if they were not, as we hope, taken on the instructions from Washington-border on criminal negligence and directly abetting ISIS terrorists”, the ministry said. A Foreign Ministry statement on Sunday said in an emergency UN Security Council session the United States took “an unconstructive and indistinct position”.
US Ambassador to the UN Samantha Power, who expressed regret over the loss of life due to the airstrike, criticized Moscow for calling for a UN Security Council emergency meeting in light of the incident.
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Almost half a million people have been killed in the Syrian conflict since 2011. Damascus has since announced no extensions of the truce.
