Air strikes hit aid convoy as Syria says ceasefire over

An aid convoy was hit in Aleppo province, the United Nations said on Monday, as the Syrian military declared that a week-long ceasefire was over.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group said the attacks were carried out by either Syrian or Russian aircraft, adding that there had been 35 strikes in and around Aleppo since the truce ended.

Fourteen Syrian Arab Red Crescent volunteers were killed, Elhadj As Sy, secretary general of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, told a U.N. summit.

At least 18 of 31 trucks in a U.N. and Syrian Arab Red Crescent (SARC) convoy were hit along with an SARC warehouse, said U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric. The convoy was delivering aid for 78,000 people in the hard-to-reach town of Urm al-Kubra, he said.

“Our outrage at this attack is enormous,” said the U.N. Special Envoy for Syria, Staffan de Mistura, in a statement emailed by his spokeswoman. “The convoy was the outcome of a long process of permission and preparations to assist isolated civilians.”

The developments appeared to signal that the latest effort to halt Syria’s 5-1/2-year-old civil war was close to collapse.

Syria’s army said the seven-day truce period had ended.

It accused “terrorist groups,” a term the government uses for all insurgents, of exploiting the calm to rearm while violating the ceasefire 300 times, and vowed to “continue fulfilling its national duties in fighting terrorism in order to bring back security and stability”.

A local resident told Reuters by phone that the trucks were hit by about five missile strikes while parked in a center belonging to the Syrian Red Crescent in Urm al-Kubra, a town near Aleppo. The head of the center and several others were badly injured.

Moscow supports Syrian President Bashar al-Assad with its air force. The Syrian military could not immediately be reached for comment.

The week-old attempt at a ceasefire, negotiated by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, could be the final attempt by U.S. President Barack Obama to negotiate an end to Syria’s civil war.

Kerry called on Moscow to halt Syrian government airstrikes, including on aid convoys, and indicated that the United States had not received official word from Russia that the ceasefire deal was dead.

   “The Russians made the agreement. So we need to see what the Russians say,” Kerry said before meeting Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Nayef in New York. “But the point – the important thing is the Russians need to control Assad, who evidently is indiscriminately bombing, including of humanitarian convoys.”

The United Nations said that only Washington and Moscow could declare it over, as they were the ones who originally forged the deal.

The air strikes appeared particularly heavy in insurgent-held areas west of Aleppo, near the rebel stronghold of Idlib province. And in eastern Aleppo, a resident reached by Reuters said there had been dozens of blasts.

“It started with an hour of extremely fierce bombing,” said Besher Hawi, the former spokesman for the opposition’s Aleppo city council. “Now I can hear the sound of helicopters overhead. The last two were barrel bombs,” he said, the sound of an explosion audible in the background.