Four medics from a French relief agency have been killed in an air strike on a clinic in Syria as the United States blamed Russia for destroying an aid convoy a day earlier.
A nurse was also critically injured in the attack in rebel-held territory near Syria’s second city Aleppo. The four medics were working for the Paris-based Union of Syrian Medical Relief Organisations. They were in two ambulances that had been called to the clinic in the village of Khan Tuman to take patients for more specialised treatment, according to the USMRO.
The centre was blown apart last night and more dead were feared to be in the rubble of the three-storey building. Khan Tuman is near Urum al-Kubra, the town where an air attack is said to have hit aid trucks and a warehouse killing 20 civilians on Monday.
America today hardened accusations against Russia for the attack which happened as a short-lived truce collapsed. US officials said two Russian SU-24 planes were in the sky above the convoy, heading for the besieged city of Aleppo, at the precise moment it was hit. Syrian dictator Bashar Assad’s air force also has these aircraft but the attack was said to be too sophisticated to have been carried out by his military.
Given that air attacks should have been stopped in the area under the truce negotiated by Washington and Moscow, White House spokesman Ben Rhodes said: “We hold the Russian government responsible.”
Moscow strongly denied that its planes targeted the convoy. There was speculation that the air strike was in retaliation for a recent US-led attack, involving at least one RAF drone, which killed dozens of Assad’s troops mistaken for Islamic State fighters. Queen Rania of Jordan told CNN that the destruction of the aid convoy was “a terrible crime” that showed “how much we have failed in Syria.”
Boris Johnson piled pressure on Moscow to rescue the Syrian truce, which has been repeatedly breached and said by the Assad’s military to have ended.
The Foreign Secretary held face-to-face talks with his Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov in New York yesterday and he is said to have admitted that Russian planes were in the area at the time of the strike.
The United Nations has suspended overland deliveries in Syria, jeopardising food and medical security for millions of besieged and hard-to-reach civilians.
