Syrian opposition calls for suspension of US-led strikes

BEARING THE BRUNT: Five-year-old Syrian girl Rima lies in a hospital bed as she undergoes treatment in Duma, three days after she was wounded in shelling by Syrian regime forces in the village of Al-Rehan. (AFP)

BEIRUT: The head of the opposition Syrian National Coalition called for a suspension of the US-led air campaign against Daesh in Syria while reports of dozens of civilian deaths from airstrikes around the northern city of Manbij are investigated.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said at least 56 civilians were killed in airstrikes north of Manbij on Tuesday, a day after it said 21 civilians were killed in a northern district of the besieged, Daesh-held city.
SNC president Anas Al-Abdah said the strikes should be halted while the incidents were investigated, and warned that the killing of civilians by US-led aircraft would “prove to be a recruitment tool for terrorist organizations.”
“It is essential that such investigation not only result in revised rules of procedure for future operations, but also inform accountability for those responsible for such major violations,” Abdah wrote in a letter to foreign ministers of countries in the anti-Daesh alliance.
US Defense Secretary Ash Carter said on Wednesday the US-led force would look into the reports of civilian casualties around Manbij.
The Observatory said the dead from Tuesday’s air strike included 11 children. The United Nations children’s agency UNICEF said it had been told that families were preparing to flee when the villages they were in came under air attack.
“UNICEF estimates that 35,000 children are trapped in and around Manbij with nowhere safe to go,” the agency’s representative in Syria, Hanaa Singer, said. The Syrian Foreign Ministry said Tuesday’s airstrike on the village of Toukhar north of Manbij was carried out by French forces, while Monday’s strike was by US jets.
“(Syria) condemns, with the strongest terms, the two bloody massacres perpetrated by the French and US warplanes and those affiliated to the so-called international coalition which send their missiles and bombs to the civilians instead of directing them to the terrorist gangs,” it said in a letter sent to the United Nations this week, according to state news agency SANA.
The UN called for a weekly 48-hour truce in Aleppo to allow aid deliveries to reach some 250,000 civilians facing starvation.
The head of the UN-backed humanitarian taskforce for Syria, Jan Egeland, said reporters that aid agencies were ready to send life-saving supplies to the city’s rebel-held eastern districts but raging violence has blocked convoys from deploying.
“Humanitarian convoys are ready, humanitarian workers are ready. We have the supplies. We need a break in the fighting,” Egeland said following the weekly meeting of the taskforce co-chaired by Russia, which supports Damascus, and the United States, which backs some rebel groups.
“The clock is ticking,” he said, describing people in Syria’s second city as being “on the brink of starvation.”