US-led coalition airstrikes on Syria killed nine civilians in the east of the town of Mare, approximately 25 kilometres north of Aleppo yesterday.
Meanwhile, the Syrian army wrested control of al-Kandi Hospital, south of the Handarat refugee camp – also located in Aleppo’s northern suburbs — from foreign-backed terrorists, killing an unspecified number of them in the process.
The army also engaged armed militants in southern Aleppo by carrying out mortar and rocket offensives against them. Last month, a US airstrike killed more than 80 Syrian soldiers, who had been fighting the Takfiri terrorists in the eastern parts of the country.
Damascus says Washington deliberately targeted the Syrian soldiers.
The US and Russia-brokered ceasefire regime in Syria has been violated by illegal armed groups 71 times over the last 24 hours, including 45 times in the Aleppo province, 18 times in Damascus where a medical school was hit, five times in Latakia and three times in Hama, the Russian Centre for reconciliation of the warring parties in Syria said in an informational bulletin published on the Russian Defence Ministry’s website yesterday.
The Russian Aerospace Defence Forces and Syrian Air Force did not deliver airstrikes at opposition armed groups that joined the ceasefire regime and informed the Russian or US reconciliation centres about their locations. The failure of a diplomatic settlement in Syria may result in a full-scale war which will lead to ‘tectonic shifts’ in the whole region, Russian Foreign Ministry’s official spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said yesterday.
She said: ‘The lobby in US is now really muddying the waters and not allowing the reaching of an agreement. Their logic is – “why do we need diplomacy, UN, talks, international law, why do we need any commitments on the international arena, when there is power and the right of a powerful one, and there are our own national laws which may stand above other laws and be strengthened by methods of resolving a problem by power.” We already know this logic, there is nothing new about it. It usually ends with one thing – a full-scale war.’
The spokeswoman declined to answer the question on Russia’s possible reaction in case the United States uses force against Syria. I cannot speculate on what will happen if… This is the task of experts. My task is to explain why it is so important to stay in the framework of the agreements,’ she said.
‘If US starts a direct aggression against Damascus and the Syrian army, this will lead to scary tectonic shifts not only on the territory of Syria, but in the whole region as well,’ she noted. US State Secretary John Kerry had earlier said that Washington may freeze cooperation on Syria with Moscow.