US and Russia to hold talks after worst bombardment in months on whether collapsed ceasefire can be restored

Aleppo has suffered its worst bombardment in months with dozens of civilians killed overnight, hours before talks between the US and Russia talks in New York attempted to restore Syria’s shattered ceasefire.

Residents of eastern Aleppo said airstrikes continued through the night and into late Thursday afternoon. Doctors and activists said they had not yet updated the death toll, which stood at 49 for Wednesday, because the dead and wounded were too numerous and hospitals were under pressure.

Rescue operations were also still ongoing throughout the rebel-held parts of the city. “The pressure on the hospitals is very dire,” said one doctor.

Boris Johnson: 'strong' evidence Russia carried out strike on UN convoy in Syria Read more

The UN resumed its attempts to deliver humanitarian relief to trapped populations in towns around Syria for the first time since one of its convoys was attacked on Monday. A convoy reached Moadamiyeh, on the rural outskirts of Damascus on Thursday with food for 40,000 people, according to Jan Egeland, the humanitarian adviser to the UN envoy for Syria.

He said other convoys would set out on Friday and Saturday. Other UN officials, however, said they could not confirm that all of the lorries in Thursday’s convoy had reached their destinations safely and been unloaded.

Egeland, who is also head of the Norwegian Refugee Council, described Monday’s attack on Syrian Arab Red Crescent trucks as they were unloading UN food and medicines at an warehouse in the town of Urem al-Kubra as “the worst attack ever sustained on a cross-line convoy” in the five years of Syria’s war.

“We are not giving up. The entire humanitarian nature is about not giving up,” he said.

The US secretary of state, John Kerry, was due to meet his Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, and other foreign ministers on Thursday afternoon on the sidelines of the UN general assembly in New York. They were to discuss whether the ceasefire they agreed on 9 September could be resurrected after Syrian armed forces declared they were no longer bound by it on Monday evening.

The two men clashed at a tense UN security council meeting on Wednesday over responsibility for the attack on the UN convoy and the collapse of the ceasefire. Kerry demanded the immediate grounding of the Syrian air force as a way of restoring the credibility of the abandoned truce.



Since Monday, it has stepped up its bombing of rebel strongholds, and both Russia and Syria have been implicated in the attack on the relief convoy, which the UN has deemed a potential war crime.

On Thursday, the Syrian American Medical Society, which operates and supports several hospitals in the country, said one of its facilities in Aleppo had been targeted overnight with cluster munitions. The UN said a clinic had been destroyed in Khan Tuman district, killing medical staff and with civilians still reportedly trapped under the rubble.

The Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, denied his government was responsible for the repeated bombing of hospitals. “We don’t attack any hospitals,” he told the Associated Press. “This is how we can help the terrorists, if we attack hospitals, schools, and things like this.”

Assad also rejected criticism of his forces’ use of barrel bombs, improvised crates of high explosives most often dropped on urban areas from helicopters. He said the focus on such weapons was because “in the media ‘when it bleeds, it leads’.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Civil Defence members and Syrians work after the airstrikes. Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

“A bomb is a bomb, what’s the difference between different kinds of bombs? All bombs are to kill, but it’s about how to use it,” he said. “When you use an armament, you use it to defend the civilians. You kill terrorists in order to defend civilians.”

Fresh details of the horror from a night of intense bombardment emerged on Thursday, including the death of a family of seven in Aleppo’s al-Kallaseh neighbourhood on Wednesday night. The dead included a 14-year-old boy, Ayham, and two infants aged five and nine months, named Laren and Hana’a.

Another family survived for hours under the rubble of their home before being rescued by the father.

“The planes have not left the city’s skies and the bombing is continuous and indiscriminate,” said one activist in eastern Aleppo. Heavy clashes gripped the city’s outskirts after airstrikes triggered major fires, with local activists blaming incendiary bombs.



“It’s so close to my house and I can see the fire,” said one resident in a voice message sent two hours after midnight. “There is fire in the sky.”

The UN, eager to bring Russia and the US back to the negotiating table, refused to blame Russia for the attack on the aid convoy, or even to say if the attack was caused by air or ground weaponry. It did, however, say that the UN had received no warnings from armed opposition groups around Aleppo that they would oppose the convoy.



Calling for an inquiry free of Russian or US military influence, Egeland said: “We owe it to those who died and were wounded that such an investigation happens”.

“We need a reboot, we need a restart for security assurances, guarantees for the humanitarian lifeline,” he said. “So let this be a turning point, let this be the bleakest moment and let’s hope we have passed it.”

Before Thursday’s New York meeting, Syrian civil society groups issued a letter saying they would not support a resumption of the Geneva talks without guarantees that a ceasefire would be enforced.

The letter’s signatories call for detailed terms of the ceasefire to be published, with clear consequences for those that violate it, including armed militias. They also call for an independent monitoring mechanism in line with proposals set out on Wednesday by the French foreign minister, Jean-Marc Ayrault.



The letter says: “We know from experience that a failure to impose consequences for violations will ensure that killing of civilians resumes. You must guarantee that violations will be met with concrete, predetermined and publicly articulated steps to protect civilians. We will not support participation in further Geneva talks by Syrian civil society or opposition groups unless enforcement mechanisms are guaranteed.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Rescue workers on the site of airstrikes in the al-Sakhour neighbourhood of the rebel-held part of eastern Aleppo. Photograph: AP

On Wednesday, Kerry called for all Syrian planes to be prevented from flying over combat zones where humanitarian aid was delivered, as Russia announced its only aircraft carrier would be sent to the Syrian coast.

Humanitarian deliveries had been a condition of the truce negotiated by the White House and the Kremlin, but Assad’s government has consistently refused to allow aid into besieged eastern Aleppo. A US airstrike during the ceasefire also inadvertently killed more than 60 Syrian army soldiers, prompting condemnation and fury from Moscow.

About a million Syrians live in besieged areas in dire need of humanitarian aid.

Aleppo, once Syria’s commercial capital, is divided into a western portion controlled by the government and an eastern area held by rebels. The eastern part has been besieged for two months, except for a brief window when the blockade was broken. A defeat in the city would be a huge blow to the rebellion.