On Sunday, Aleppo saw an “unprecedented” day of airstrikes as the UN Security Council held a crisis meeting over the continuing violence in Syria. The above video shows the British ambassador Matthew Rycroft condemning what many — including U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry — view as Russia’s inhumane actions in the country, which include the bombing of an aid convoy after the ending of the failed U.S. and Russia-brokered ceasefire.
ABC News reports that the air assaults on Aleppo are only growing worse with hospitals receiving 180 people on Sunday (some 40 percent of victims being children) after Syrian and Russian warplanes conducted a bombing raid. A nurse described this as the most horrific violence — all aimed at the rebel held-portion of Aleppo — he’d seen in the region’s five years of war. About the same time this air assault went down, reports The Independent, multiple western UN ambassadors (including Rycroft, U.S. ambassador Samantha Power, and French ambassador Francois Delattre) staged a walkout to protest what Rycroft described as Russia’s “barbaric” war crimes. Power also spoke out with a condemnation: “What Russia is sponsoring and doing is not counterterrorism, it is barbarism.”
The walkout’s timing bolstered Rycroft’s accusation of war crimes on behalf of both the Syrian regime and Russia, and multiple western ambassadors condemned Russia’s hypocrisy in agreeing to the recent ceasefire while backing the Syrian offensive, by which President Bashar Assad hopes to recapture the divided city of Aleppo. Here’s a video of the walkout in process, which was a bold statement launched as Syria’s ambassador began to speak.
(Via The Independent, Times of India & CNN)
