Air strikes threaten cease-fire, Russia warns

MOSCOW has stepped up its war of words with Washington, saying air strikes by a US-led coalition on the Syrian army threatened the implementation of a US-Russian cease-fire plan for Syria and bordered on connivance with Islamic State (IS).

The Russian defence ministry said on Saturday that US jets had killed more than 60 Syrian soldiers in the Syrian city of Deir alZor in four air strikes.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based monitoring group with contacts across Syria, cited a military source at Deir al-Zor airport as saying at least 90 Syrian soldiers had been killed.

Russia’s foreign ministry said in a strongly worded statement that the US’s position on the incident was “unconstructive and inarticulate”.

“The actions of coalition pilots — if they, as we hope, were not taken on an order from Washington — are on the boundary between criminal negligence and connivance with Islamic State terrorists,” it said.

“We strongly urge Washington to exert the needed pressure on the illegal armed groups under its patronage to implement the cease-fire plan unconditionally. Otherwise the implementation of the entire package of the US-Russian accords reached in Geneva on September 9 may be jeopardised.”

Russia has repeatedly called on the US to push units of moderate Syrian opposition to separate from Islamic State and other “terrorist groups“.

The foreign ministry said Saturday’s incident was a result of the US’s “stubborn refusal” to co-operate with Moscow in fighting IS, the Nusra Front — now renamed Jabhat Fatah al Sham — and “other terrorist groups”.

The US military said the coalition stopped the attacks against what it had believed to be IS positions in northeast Syria after Russia informed it that Syrian military personnel and vehicles might have been hit.

The US further unnerved Moscow when its envoy to the UN abruptly left her seat as the Russian representative took the floor to condemn the air strikes at an emergency US Security Council meeting.

“We are reaching a really terrifying conclusion for the whole world: that the White House is defending IS. Now there can be no doubts about that,” Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said.

The US ambassador to the UN, Samantha Power, said Zakharova should be embarrassed by that claim.

Russia’s UN representative Vitaly Churkin said Russia had no “specific evidence” of the US colluding with IS militants.

The diplomatic row is likely to further complicate the delivery of humanitarian aid to Syria, including its largest prewar city of Aleppo where the situation remains especially tense and the fragile truce has been repeatedly violated.

The UN said aid trucks that had been expected to move to Aleppo on Sunday were once again being delayed.

Russia’s defence ministry said conditions in Syria were deteriorating, as fighting escalated in parts of the country where the cease-fire, which was set to expire late on Sunday, should apply.

Heavy clashes continued on Sunday east of Damascus in the rebel-held Jobar suburb between rebels and Syrian government troops and allied forces, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

Residents living near Jobar and the wider Eastern Ghouta suburbs said they were afraid of the mortars and fighting.

The al-Rahman Legion, part of a Free Syrian Army rebel alliance in the Damascus suburbs, said in an online statement its fighters had destroyed a Syrian government tank and killed soldiers after government forces tried to storm Jobar for the second time in a week.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said six people died and many were injured when helicopters dropped barrel bombs on a town in a rebel-held part of the southern Syrian province of Daraa on Sunday.

Insurgents say they only reluctantly accepted the initial deal, which they believe is skewed against them, because it could relieve the dire humanitarian situation in besieged areas they control, and blamed Russia for undermining the truce.

“The truce, as we have warned — and we told the [US] state department — will not hold out,” a senior rebel official in Aleppo said, pointing to the continued presence of a UN aid convoy at the Turkish border awaiting permission to enter.

IS is excluded from the truce. US-led and Damascus-led operations against the militants have continued throughout the ceasefire on various fronts.