Aghast at a deadly aerial bombing of 31 humanitarian supply trucks authorized to travel in Syria, United Nations officials suspended all aid convoys in the war-ravaged country on Tuesday, described the attack as a possible war crime and called the bombers cowards.
The strike on the trucks, which were carrying critically needed supplies of food and medicine bound for rebel-held areas of Syria’s western Aleppo Province happened on Monday evening after the Syrian military declared that it regarded a seven-day partial cease-fire as over.
The convoy, escorted by the Syrian Arab Red Crescent, was among the first to try to deliver humanitarian aid to the rebel-held areas under the cease-fire agreement. Members of the group said its local chief, Omar Baraka, was among at least 12 people killed; though United Nations officials in Geneva said the death toll was unclear.
Amar Salmo, who runs the Aleppo operations of the Syrian Civil Defense, a group of volunteer rescue workers also called the White Helmets, described the wreckage in this video.
The head of the United Nations agency that coordinates aid, Stephen O’Brien, said the attack would amount to a war crime if it were found to have targeted humanitarian aid workers. He called for an independent investigation.
The photograph below shows Syrians gathering near the damaged aid trucks on Tuesday.
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Witnesses said multiple strikes had hit the convoy as workers were unloading aid, and then hit rescue workers who arrived to help.
Eighteen of the convoy’s 31 trucks — which United Nations officials say were clearly marked and were carrying wheat flour, nine tons of medicine and clothing for about 78,000 people — were destroyed. Benoit Carpentier, a spokesman for the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, said a hospital had also been destroyed.
Aid convoys have endured sniper fire and shelling during the five years of the Syrian conflict, but Monday’s attack is believed to be the first time one was hit by an airstrike.
Our Beirut bureau chief, Anne Barnard, has written about the Syrian Red Crescent and the risks its volunteers take to deliver aid to people on all sides of the war.
The convoy attack and the declaration by the military were the strongest signs yet of the gradual unraveling of a broader agreement between Russia and the United States aimed at restarting peace talks to end the conflict in Syria, which has killed an estimated 500,000 people and displaced millions.
The Times chronicled the seven-day cease-fire negotiated by Washington and Moscow — which back opposite sides in the conflict — through the observations of Syrians around the country. By Day 5, it was clear the agreement was unraveling.
John Kirby, spokesman for the State Department, called Monday’s attack an “egregious violation” of the agreement, but on Tuesday, Secretary of State John Kerry declared: “The cease-fire is not dead.”
Mr. Kerry met with his Russian counterpart, Sergey V. Lavrov, and other diplomats in New York on Tuesday morning as the United Nations General Assembly got underway.
“The mood of the meeting was very much that nobody wants to give this thing up,” said Boris Johnson, the British foreign secretary. “Quite frankly, the Kerry-Lavrov process is the only show in town, and we’ve got to get that show back on the road.”
Max Fisher, part of the team that writes the Interpreter column for The Times, wrote last week about how even cease-fire agreements that seem to fail miserably can move the ball toward eventually ending conflicts. Last month, he had this explanation for why Syria’s conflict only seems to ever get worse.
Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, in his opening speech to the General Assembly on Tuesday, denounced the convoy bombing in strong terms, his voice tense with anger.
“Just when we think it cannot get any worse, the bar of depravity sinks lower,” Mr. Ban said in the speech, his last as leader of the organization after a decade in the job, much of it preoccupied with Syria.
“The humanitarians delivering lifesaving aid were heroes,” he added. “Those who bombed them were cowards.”
THE NEW YORK TIMES
