The United States is preparing to suspend all bilateral cooperation with Russia over Syria unless Moscow takes immediate steps to end the ongoing assault on the city of Aleppo and moves to restore a collapsed cease-fire, the State Department said Wednesday.
The action would mean the effective end of nearly a year of intensive, bilateral diplomacy, led by Secretary of State John Kerry, to wean Russia away from its support for President Bashar Assad and persuade it to join forces with the United States in its counterterrorism efforts in Syria against al-Qaida and the Islamic State.
The announcement came amid reports of a ferocious ongoing assault by Syrian and Russian jets and Syrian ground troops on surrounded, rebel-occupied eastern Aleppo, where the United Nations has said more than 250,000 civilians are trapped.
In a telephone conversation early Wednesday with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, Kerry “expressed grave concern over the deteriorating situation in Syria, particularly for continued Russian and Syrian regime attacks on hospitals, the water supply network, and other civilian infrastructure in Aleppo,” State Department spokesman John Kirby said in a statement.
Kerry, the statement said, “made clear that the United States and its partners hold Russia responsible for the situation, including the use of incendiary and bunker buster bombs in an urban environment, a drastic escalation that puts civilians at great risk.”
He also “informed the Foreign Minister that the United States is making preparations to suspend U.S.-Russia bilateral engagement on Syria – including on the establishment of a Joint Implementation Center to coordinate strikes on terrorist targets – unless Russia takes immediate steps to end the assault on Aleppo and restore the cessation of hostilities.”
The Joint Implementation Center, proposed by Kerry to Moscow last summer, has been a carrot held out to Russia in exchange for using its influence over Assad to ground his air force and allow humanitarian aid to flow to besieged civilian areas.
Under its terms, the two countries would then begin to share information about terrorist locations in Syria and coordinate their airstrikes against them. The truce was eventually to lead to political negotiations among Syrians to bring an end to their five-year civil war.
The overall plan began with a cease-fire Sept. 12 that began to fall apart after a few days as Syria began renewed bombing, saying it was responding to “violations” by rebel fighters on the ground. Russia then joined in the airstrikes, which have been focused on eastern Aleppo.
Amid U.N. pleading for an end to the carnage, to allow the safe passage of humanitarian convoys, the United States and its allies have charged Russia with responsibility for last week’s attack on the first – and so far the only – international aid convoy that was ready to enter the city, resulting in the deaths of at least 20 humanitarian workers.
The eastern part of the city has been without clean water and electric supplies for some time, and the intense bombing that began over the weekend with a Syrian government pledge to retake Aleppo has caused extensive civilian casualties, according to the United Nations and humanitarian organizations.
Russia made no initial response to the threat to end bilateral cooperation. Earlier Wednesday, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said a U.S. threat to impose new sanctions on Russia and Syria caused “deep misunderstanding, especially among those who know the real state of things in Syria, the real state of things with the implementation of the commitments indicated in the Russian-U.S. accord.”
(c) 2016, The Washington Post ยท Karen DeYoung
