Sept 22, 2016 16H:44 GMT/UTC/ZULU TIME
Warplanes mounted the heaviest air strikes in months against rebel-held districts of the city of Aleppo overnight, as Russia and the Syrian government spurned a U.S. plea to halt flights, burying any hope for the revival of a doomed ceasefire.
Rebel officials and rescue workers said incendiary bombs were among the weapons that rained from the sky on the city. Hamza al-Khatib, the director of a hospital in the rebel-held east, told Reuters the death toll was 45.
"It's as if the planes are trying to compensate for all the days they didn't drop bombs" during the ceasefire, Ammar al-Selmo, the head of the civil defense rescue service in opposition-held eastern Aleppo told us at Reuters.
"It was like there was coordination between the planes and the artillery shelling, because the shells were hitting the same locations that the planes hit," he said.
The assault, by aircraft from the Syrian government, its Russian allies or both, made clear that Moscow and Damascus had rejected a plea by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry to halt flights so that aid could be delivered and a ceasefire salvaged.
In a tense televised exchange with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov at the United Nations on Wednesday, Kerry said stopping the bombardment was the last chance to find a way "out of the carnage".
President Bashar al-Assad meanwhile indicated he saw no quick end to the war, telling AP News it would "drag on" as long as it is part of a global conflict in which terrorists were backed by Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey, and the United States.
Moscow and Washington announced the ceasefire two weeks ago with great fanfare. But the agreement, probably the final bid for a breakthrough on Syria before President Barack Obama leaves office next year, appears to have suffered the same ill fate as all previous peace efforts in a war that has killed hundreds of thousands of Syrians and made half the nation homeless.
The truce foundered on Monday with an attack on an aid convoy, which Washington blamed on Russian warplanes. Russia denied involvement. Prior to that, tensions between Washington and Moscow spiked over a lethal air raid on Syrian government troops by the U.S.-led coalition against Islamic State.
Washington says it struck Syrian forces by mistake on Sept 17. Assad said in his interview he believed the strikes, which he said lasted over an hour, were deliberate.
There was no immediate comment from the Syrian military or mention on state media of Thursday's bombardment of Aleppo.
"It was the heaviest air strikes for months inside Aleppo city," said Rami Abdulrahman, director of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights which monitors the conflict from Britain.
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