Syria faces 'make or break moment'

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon yesterday warned it was a "make or break moment" for Syria as the UN Security Council held crisis talks yesterday on reviving a failed ceasefire.

US Secretary of State John Kerry demanded that Russia force Bashar al-Assad's regime to ground its air force in order to revive hopes.

Addressing the UN Security Council, including his Russian opposite number Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, Kerry said efforts to find peace could yet be salvaged but only if Moscow takes responsibility for recent air strikes.

Kerry said that only Russian and Syrian war planes had been active in areas of northern Syria where on Monday a United Nations aid convoy had been destroyed from the air and on Tuesday a field clinic was bombed.

Moscow has rejected the idea that Russian or Syrian planes carried out Monday's strike on the UN aid convoy, and Lavrov told the council that there would be "no more unilateral pauses" by Assad's government forces.

Russian military spokesman Igor Konashenkov yesterday claimed a Predator drone from the US-led coalition was in the air over the aid convoy in Syria when it was destroyed.

Bombardment has escalated across the country since Monday evening, when Syria's military declared an end to the week-long truce that had brought relative calm to major fronts.

Hours after the Monday's announcement, an air strike hit an aid convoy near Aleppo, killing 20 civilians and destroying 18 trucks, the Red Cross said.

Monday's strike sparked international outrage and prompted an exasperated UN to suspend all humanitarian convoys across Syria.

On the ground, four medical staff were killed and a nurse critically wounded in an air strike on a village near Syria's second city Aleppo late Tuesday, their aid group said. Sources said the strike hit two  ambulances in Khan Tuman, a village south of Aleppo city, as workers evacuated victims from a previous strike.