In what the White House calls an \u201cenormous humanitarian tragedy\u201d Russian war planes are said to have launched an air strike on an aid convoy. 18 out of 31 lorries were destroyed and about 20 civilians were killed including a senior official of the Syrian Arab Red Crescent. Russia strongly denies any involvement stating that their planes were not responsible and the attack was caused by fire on the ground.<\/p>\n
Russia\u2019s defence ministry stated, \u201cThere are no craters and the exterior of the vehicles do not have the kind of damage consistent with blasts caused by bombs dropped from the air.\u201d Meanwhile the foreign ministry spokeswoman announced that the US had \u201cno facts\u201d to support their claim adding \u201cWe have nothing to do with this situation.\u201d<\/p>\n
US officials continued further on the convoy attack saying that two Russian SU-24 attack aircraft were in the air over the convoy at the exact moment it was hit in Urum al-Kubra. They claim the attack was too precise to be carried out by the Syrian army.<\/p>\n
White House spokesman Ben Rhodes later said, \u201cThere only could have been two entities responsible, either the Syrian regime or the Russian government.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn any event, we hold the Russian government responsible for airstrikes in this space.\u201d<\/p>\n
The UN however have stated they are in no position to determine if these were air strikes. Since the attack all aid convoys have been suspended in Syria by the UN.<\/p>\n
Peter Maurer, President of the International Committee of the Red Cross has said the attack was a \u201cflagrant violation of international humanitarian law\u201d saying it could amount to a war crime.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In what the White House calls an \u201cenormous humanitarian tragedy\u201d Russian war planes are said to have launched an air strike on an aid convoy. 18 out of 31 lorries were destroyed and about 20 civilians were killed including a senior official of the Syrian Arab Red Crescent. Russia strongly denies any involvement stating that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":19,"featured_media":17689,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39,112],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17688","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-international-news","category-top-stories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17688","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/19"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17688"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17688\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17689"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17688"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17688"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17688"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}