Russia bombardment of Aleppo, Syria

The US and Russia exchanged diplomatic jabs on Sunday night and into Monday over the Russia-backed Syrian government’s latest scorched-earth offensive on rebel holdouts in the country’s largest city.

 

“What Russia is sponsoring and doing is not counterterrorism, it is barbarism,” Samantha Power, US ambassador to the United Nations, told member nations at a UN Security Council meeting on Sunday.

 

“Instead of pursuing peace, Russia and [Syrian President Bashar] Assad make war. 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.”

 

Hundreds of people have died over the past week in the worst aerial bombardments of the rebel-held eastern half of Aleppo since the war began in 2011. The bombings punctuated the collapse of a fragile cease-fire brokered between the US and Russia earlier this month.

 

The UN’s special envoy for Syria, Staffan de Mistura, noted on Sunday that the bombardments had reached a “remarkable new intensity — unprecedented in scale and type of bombing,” and warned that a renewed takeover battle for rebel-held eastern Aleppo could mean “a slow, grinding, street-by-street fight over the course of months if not years.”

 

Read More: Russia bombardment of Aleppo, Syria – Business Insider