Syria says truce still viable after week of airstrikes

BEIRUT — Syria’s foreign minister said Monday that an internationally brokered cease-fire is still viable, as rescue workers in Aleppo sifted through the rubble from the heaviest airstrikes on rebel-held areas of the northern city in five years.

Foreign Minister Walid al-Moallem, speaking to Mayadeen TV from New York, also said the government is prepared to take part in a unity government incorporating elements from the opposition, an offer that has been rejected in the past.

Opposition activists say more than 200 civilians have been killed in the past week under a sustained aerial campaign that U.N. envoy Staffan de Mistura called one of the worst of the 5½year war. The U.N. Security Council convened an emergency meeting but failed to take any action because of deep divisions between Russia and Western powers.

“What Russia is sponsoring and doing is not counterterrorism, it’s barbarism,” said U.S. Ambassador Samantha Power. “It’s apocalyptic what is being done in eastern Aleppo.”

Airstrikes on Aleppo on Monday killed at least six, according to the Local Coordination Committees, an activist-run collective. The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported later that 12 died.

President Bashar Assad’s media adviser, Bouthaina Shaaban, said the Syrian government abided by the truce but the rebels did not.

Mr. al-Moallem accused the U.S., Britain and France of convening the Security Council meeting a day earlier to support “terrorists” inside Syria. But he said ongoing communications between U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov meant the truce is “not dead.”