UN slanging match over Syria bombing
WESTERN powers traded barbs with Russia during an acrimonious emergency meeting of the UN Security Council to halt the bombing of Aleppo, the centre of opposition to the government of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, without reaching agreement.
UN special envoy Staffan de Mistura said nearly 2-million people in Aleppo, Syria’s largest city and former commercial centre, were without running water following an escalation in fighting. At least 231 civilians had been killed in violence in Aleppo and its outskirts since a truce collapsed, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a monitoring organisation, said.
Western nations including the ambassadors of France and the UK, said the bombing of civilians in Aleppo was tantamount to a war crime.
“What Russia is sponsoring and doing is not counterterrorism; it is barbarism,” Samantha Power, the US ambassador to the UN, said. “Instead of helping get life-saving aid to civilians, Russia and Assad are bombing the humanitarian convoys, hospitals, and first responders who are trying desperately to keep people alive,” she said.
The gathering in New York was the third contentious Security Council meeting on Syria since September 17. During a meeting on September 21, US Secretary of State John Kerry called on Russia and Syria to ground their aircraft, a demand that was rejected.
“A so-called military solution or victory in Syria is impossible, including in Aleppo,” De Mistura said. “My appeal to this council is: please develop a common course of action to enforce a cessation of hostilities in Syria.”
The US and Russia reached an agreement on cessation of hostilities on September 9 that into effect three days later. It called for a reduction in violence, a grounding of Syrian air force planes and joint targeting of the Islamic State and Nusra Front terrorist groups.
The truce did not last long. On September 17, coalition aircraft bombed a military base in the Syrian city of Deir Ezzor, killing 62 Syrian soldiers and wounding 100. Power told an emergency Security Council meeting on the same day that the US regretted the attack.
On September 20, a UN humanitarian convoy delivering aid to Aleppo was bombed, killing 20 aid workers and destroying 18 trucks.
US officials said Russia was responsible, a claim that was denied by Moscow.
The latest escalation in fighting comes after the failure of two International Syria Support Group meetings as world leaders gathered for the UN General Assembly in hopes of reaching an agreement on another truce and on how to advance talks on the political process.
Mohammad Javad Zarif, the foreign minister of Iran, which supports Assad’s government and has fighters on the ground in Syria, said on Twitter that “talk is cheap” at the Security Council.
The aim of the ceasefire was to allow terrorist groups to replenish their fighting ability, Russia’s UN ambassador Vitaly Churkin told the council. “We always sought to compromise. The rebels are taking medicine and food allocated for civilians; 200,000 Aleppo residents are prisoners of terrorist groups.”
In a statement, UN secretarygeneral Ban Ki-moon condemned the “chilling” escalation in Aleppo, which he said marked the “most sustained and intense bombardment since the start of the Syrian conflict”.
France, Germany, Italy, the UK, the US and the EU said in a joint statement that Russia had to prove its willingness to take “extraordinary steps” to help restore a cessation of hostilities in Syria.