'Show some humanity'
The United Nations has suspended its humanitarian task force in Syria amid frustration over continued fighting in the country's civil war.
The decision was announced yesterday as a haunting photo of a young boy rescued from beneath rubble of his home after a devastating air strike in Aleppo provoked outrage around the world.
Staffan de Mistura, the special envoy for Syria, stopped a meeting on humanitarian access after just eight minutes, saying it made “no sense” to plan aid deliveries when they would not be let into besieged areas.
Speaking in Geneva, he said convoys had not reached surrounded towns and cities in the past month, and that the task force would remain suspended until next week as a signal to world powers.
“I insist, on behalf of the UN Secretary General, to have a 48-hour pause in Aleppo,” de Mistura said, calling for a "gesture of humanity from both sides".
Friday will be the annual World Humanitarian Day, he noted.
"And in Syria what we are hearing and seeing is only fighting, offensives, counter-offensives, rockets, barrel bombs, mortars, hellfire cannons, napalm, chlorine, snipers, air strikes, suicide bombers," he said, in reference to recent allegations of chemical weapons attacks.
Meanwhile, Syrian government warplanes bombed Kurdish-controlled areas of the city of Hasaka in northeastern Syria yesterday for the first time in the five-year-old civil war, the spokesman for the Syrian Kurdish YPG militia and a monitoring group said.
YPG spokesman Redur Xelil said the air strikes had hit Kurdish districts of the city, which is mostly controlled by Kurdish groups, and the positions of a Kurdish security force known as the Asayish. "There are martyrs and wounded," he told Reuters.
Russian bombers, meanwhile, launched a third day of air strikes against Islamic state militants in Syria's Deir al-Zor province from an Iranian air base, the Russian defence ministry said yesterday.
And the United States said it was looking at whether Russia has violated a UN Security Council resolution on military dealings with Tehran by using the Iranian air base, the State Department said on Wednesday.
Moscow first used Iran as a base from which to launch air strikes in Syria on Tuesday, deepening its involvement in the five-year-old Syrian civil war and angering the United States. Russian officials on Wednesday rejected US criticisms of its use of the base.
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