Tag Archives: Syria

Samples confirm Islamic State used mustard gas in Iraq, diplomat says

AMSTERDAM (Reuters) – Islamic State militants attacked Kurdish forces in Iraq with mustard gas last year, the first known use of chemical weapons in Iraq since the fall of Saddam Hussein, a diplomat said, based on tests by the global chemical weapons watchdog.

A source at the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) confirmed that laboratory tests had come back positive for the sulfur mustard, after around 35 Kurdish troops were sickened on the battlefield last August.

The OPCW will not identify who used the chemical agent. But the diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity because the findings have not yet been released, said the result confirmed that chemical weapons had been used by Islamic State fighters.

The samples were taken after the soldiers became ill during fighting against Islamic State militants southwest of Erbil, capital of Iraq’s autonomous Kurdish region.

The OPCW already concluded in October that mustard gas was used last year in neighboring Syria. Islamic State has declared a “caliphate” in territory it controls in both Iraq and Syria and does not recognize the frontier.

Experts believe that the sulfur mustard either originated from an undeclared Syrian chemical stockpile, or that militants have gained the basic know how to develop and conduct a crude chemical attack with rockets or mortars.

Iraq’s chemical arsenal was mainly destroyed in the Saddam era, although U.S. troops encountered some old Saddam-era chemical munitions during the 2003-2011 U.S. occupation.

Syria gave up its own chemical weapons, including stockpiles of sulfur mustard, under international supervision after hundreds of civilians were killed with sarin nerve gas in a Damascus suburb in 2013, an attack Western countries blame on President Bashar al-Assad’s government, which denies it.

Sulfur mustard is a Class 1 chemical agent, which means it has very few uses outside chemical warfare. Used with lethal effectiveness in World War One, it causes severe delayed burns to the eyes, skin and respiratory tract.

(Reporting by Anthony Deutsch; Editing by Peter Graff)

Russia keeps bombing despite Syria truce, Assad vows to fight on

MUNICH/AMMAN (Reuters) – Major powers agreed on Friday to a pause in combat in Syria, but Russia pressed on with bombing in support of its ally President Bashar al-Assad, who vowed to fight until he regained full control of the country.

Although billed as a potential breakthrough, the “cessation of hostilities” agreement does not take effect for a week, at a time when Assad’s government is poised to win its biggest victory of the war with the backing of Russian air power.

If implemented, the deal hammered out at five hours of late night talks in Munich would allow humanitarian aid to reach besieged towns. It was described by the countries that took part as a rare diplomatic success in a conflict that has fractured the Middle East, killed at least 250,000 people, made 11 million homeless and sent hundreds of thousands fleeing into Europe.

But several Western countries said there was no hope for progress without a halt to the Russian bombing, which has decisively turned the balance of power in favor of Assad.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said that if the peace plan fails, more foreign troops could enter the conflict.

“If the Assad regime does not live up to its responsibilities and if the Iranians and the Russians do not hold Assad to the promises that they have made…then the international community obviously is not going to sit there like fools and watch this. There will be an increase of activity to put greater pressure on them,” Kerry, who was in Munich, told Dubai-based Orient TV.

“There is a possibility there will be additional ground troops.”

U.S. President Barack Obama has ruled out sending U.S. ground troops to Syria, but Saudi Arabia this month offered ground forces to fight Islamic State.

Rebels said the town of Tal Rifaat in northern Aleppo province was the target of intensive bombing by Russian planes on Friday morning. The British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a monitoring body, said warplanes believed to be Russian also attacked towns in northern Homs.

The news agency AFP quoted Assad as saying he would continue to fight terrorism while talks took place. He would retake the entire country, although this could take a long time, he said.

Another week of fighting would give the Damascus government and its Russian, Lebanese and Iranian allies time to press on with the encirclement of Aleppo, Syria’s biggest city before the war, which they are now on the verge of capturing.

They are also close to sealing the Turkish border, lifeline of rebel territory for years.

Those two victories would reverse years of insurgent gains, effectively ending the rebels’ hopes of dislodging Assad through force, the cause they have fought for since 2011 with the encouragement of Arab states, Turkey and the West.

The cessation of hostilities agreement falls short of a formal ceasefire, since it was not signed by the main warring parties – the opposition and government forces.

Implementing it will now be the key, Kerry said: “What we need to see in the next few days are actions on the ground.”

Two Syrian rebel commanders told Reuters they had been sent “excellent quantities” of ground-to-ground Grad missiles by foreign backers in recent days to help confront the Russian-backed offensive.

Foreign opponents of Assad including Saudi Arabia and Turkey have been supplying vetted rebel groups with weapons via a Turkey-based operations center. Some of the vetted groups have received military training overseen by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.

RUSSIAN TARGETS

Russia suggested it might not stop its air strikes, even when the cessation of hostilities takes effect in a week.

Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Moscow would not stop bombing fighters from Islamic State and a rebel group called the Nusra Front, which is affiliated with al Qaeda, neither of which were covered by the cessation deal: “Our airspace forces will continue working against these organizations,” he said.

Moscow has always said that those two jihadist groups are the principal targets of its air campaign. Western countries say Russia has in fact been mostly attacking other insurgent groups. Nusra fighters often operate in areas where other rebel groups are also active.

Turkey’s foreign minister said on Friday Russia was targeting schools and hospitals in Syria.

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said Moscow must halt strikes on insurgents other than Islamic State for any peace deal to work.

“Russia has mainly targeted opposition groups and not ISIL (Islamic State). Air strikes of Russian planes against different opposition groups in Syria have actually undermined the efforts to reach a negotiated, peaceful solution,” he said.

Britain and France said a peace deal could only be reached if Moscow stops bombing insurgents other than Islamic State.

The complex, multi-sided civil war in Syria has drawn in most regional and global powers, producing the world’s worst humanitarian emergency and attracting jihadist recruits from around the world.

The United States has been leading its own air campaign against Islamic State fighters since 2014, when that group, also known as ISIS or ISIL, swept through much of eastern Syria and northern Iraq, declaring a caliphate.

U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter said on Friday he expected Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to send commandos to help recapture Islamic State’s eastern Syrian stronghold, Raqqa.

Assad said he believed Saudi Arabia and Turkey were planning to invade his country. Russia has said Saudi ground troops would make the war last forever.

Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister said the main objective in Syria was still to remove Assad, and “we will achieve it”.

The main battlefields in the civil war are in the west of the country, far from Islamic State’s strongholds, where Washington has largely steered clear, leaving the field to Russia which began its air campaign on Sept. 30 last year.

Kerry had entered the Munich talks pushing for a rapid halt to fighting, with Western officials saying Moscow was holding out for a delay.

The tactic of agreeing to a break in hostilities while battling for gains on the ground is one Moscow’s allies used in eastern Ukraine only a year ago. A ceasefire there eventually took hold, but only after Russian-backed separatists overran a besieged town after the deal was reached.

HIGH HOPES

Diplomats from countries backing the plan met on Friday to discuss sending in urgent humanitarian aid.

“I sense now that all of the ISSG (International Syria Support Group) members want to get aid to the besieged areas and also the hard-to-reach areas,” said Jan Egeland, the head of the Norwegian Refugee Council, who chaired the meeting in Geneva.

“Convoys can go very soon if and when we have the permission and the green light from the parties.”

The group, which includes Russia and Iran, had given “excellent feedback” and would meet again on Wednesday, Egeland told reporters after the 3 hour meeting.

The sides in Munich called for a resumption of political peace talks, which collapsed last week in Geneva before they began after the opposition demanded a halt to bombardment.

Syria’s main opposition alliance cautiously welcomed the plan, but said it would not agree to join political talks unless the agreement proved effective.

World powers all say they support a “political transition”, but there has been disagreement for years over whether that requires Assad to leave power, as Western countries have been demanding in vain since 2011.

A senior French diplomat said it would be Moscow’s fault if it kept bombing and the peace process failed: “The Russians said they will continue bombing the terrorists. They are taking a political risk because they are accepting a negotiation in which they are committing to a cessation of hostilities.

“If in a week there is no change because of their bombing, then they will bear the responsibility.”

(Additional reporting by Denis Dyomkin, Shadia Nasralla, and Robin Emmott in Munich, and Suleiman al-Khalidi in Amman; writing by Peter Graff and Anna Willard; editing by Andrew Roche)

U.S. tells allies campaign to defeat Islamic State must be accelerated

BRUSSELS (Reuters) – The United States pressed allies on Thursday to contribute more to a U.S.-led military campaign against Islamic State that it says must be accelerated, regardless of the fate of diplomatic efforts to end Syria’s civil war.

U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter started talks on Thursday in Brussels with more than two dozen defense ministers, including from key ally Saudi Arabia, which renewed its offer potentially to send troops into Syria.

Carter’s push came a day after France delivered a rebuke to President Barack Obama, demanding that Washington show a clearer commitment to resolving the crisis in Syria where Russia is tipping the military balance in favor of President al-Bashar Assad.

The talks take place as U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry leads a diplomatic push in Munich to rescue imperiled peace efforts, which are being held despite Russian bombing raids to bolster Syrian forces around the city of Aleppo.

Carter sought to draw a line between military and diplomatic efforts. “Our focus here is going to be on counter-ISIL and that campaign will go on because ISIL must be defeated, will be defeated, whatever happens with the Syrian civil war,” Carter told reporters, using an acronym for Islamic State.

“But it certainly would help to de-fuel extremism if the Syrian civil war came to an end.”

The United States hopes the face-to-face gathering of coalition defense ministers will allow it to secure more support for a military campaign that aims to recapture the Islamic State strongholds of Raqqa in Syria and Mosul in Iraq.

WARPLANES, TRAINING, SURVEILLANCE

Carter plans to offer a long list of required military capabilities — which, beyond air power, include training Iraqi forces and help with intelligence and surveillance. Carter said countries that cannot contribute militarily can help in other ways, like by choking Islamic State financing.

“We’ll all look back after victory and remember who participated in the fight,” Carter said, addressing the coalition defense ministers, adding the campaign would move more swiftly “if all of the nations in this room do even more”.

He also predicted “tangible gains” on the ground in the coming weeks, vague terminology that could mean anything from territorial advances to strikes against militant leaders or infrastructure.

Saudi Arabia’s Brigadier General Ahmed Asseri, a military spokesman, said his country was ready to send troops into Syria if there was a consensus in the coalition. But he declined to elaborate, saying: “It is too early to talk about such options.”

“Today we are talking at the strategic level,” Asseri told reporters in Brussels.

Carter and U.S. defense officials also sought to manage expectations about the talks, since many ministers will not be able to make new commitments without first winning support from their parliaments. The timeline for the campaign to retake Raqqa and Mosul is also unclear.

The head of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency cautioned this week that Iraqi forces were unlikely to recapture Mosul this year, despite hopes by Baghdad.

Carter only said securing Raqqa and Mosul needed to happen “as soon as possible”. He also acknowledged the need to grapple with Islamic State’s spread beyond Syria and Iraq, particularly in Libya.

WASHINGTON FACES SCEPTICISM

Even if there is consensus on the military plan to fight Islamic State on Thursday, it is unlikely to diminish scepticism about broader U.S. policy in Syria, which has sought to limit America’s role in the civil war.

French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius on Wednesday questioned the commitment of the United States to resolving the Syrian war. Rebel groups say that while Washington has put pressure on them to attend peace talks, they see less help on the battlefield.

NATO ally Turkey has meanwhile, upbraided the United States for supporting Syrian Kurdish PYD rebels, saying Washington’s inability to understand the group’s true nature had turned the region into a “sea of blood”.

Eager to sidestep such friction, NATO allies have focused on grappling with the humanitarian fallout from Syria’s conflict at talks over the past two days.

NATO announced on Thursday it will seek to help slow refugee flows through the Aegean Sea with a maritime mission to target criminal people smuggling networks.

(Reporting by Phil Stewart and Robin Emmott, additional reporting by Sabine Seibold, editing by Peter Millership)

Gloom at Syria talks as Russia backs government advance

MUNICH (Reuters) – Major powers began a new round of Syria talks on Thursday focusing on calls for a ceasefire and access for aid, but the mood was dour with Moscow showing no sign of calling off its bombing in support of a massive new government advance.

With the Syrian opposition saying it cannot accept a truce because it does not trust the Russians, diplomats saw little chance of progress.

The first peace talks in two years collapsed last week before they began in the face of the government offensive, one of the biggest and most consequential of the five-year war.

Thursday’s meeting in the German city of Munich was meant to allow powers to coordinate support for ongoing negotiations, but instead has turned into a desperate bid to ressurrect them.

A Western diplomat told Reuters that U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry wanted an immediate ceasefire in Syria – “All or nothing”. Moscow, however, had proposed a truce that would begin only from the start of next month, giving its Damascus allies 18 more days to recapture Aleppo, once Syria’s largest city.

Western powers were hopeful wording could be agreed that at the very least would allow more access for aid to besieged areas.

“Here we need something of a breakthrough,” said German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier. “Today, we will try what has not been achieved so far especially, to get better supplies to people locked in Syria and link this to first steps in a significant reduction of violence.”

But a senior Western diplomat summed up the pessimistic outlook: “This meeting risks being endless and I fear the results will be extremely small.”

Russia’s intervention on the battlefield on behalf of President Bashar al-Assad since last October has swung the momentum. The latest advance over the past two weeks has seen government forces and allies rout rebels and come close to encircling Aleppo, a divided city half held by rebels for years.

Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, who met Kerry ahead of the talks, said Moscow had submitted proposals for a ceasefire and was awaiting a response from other powers. But Western officials do not expect Moscow to accept the immediate halt to bombing Washington seeks.

Kerry said he expected a “serious conversation”.

“Obviously, at some point in time, we want to make progress on the issues of humanitarian access and ceasefire,” Kerry said.

Russia is widely viewed as unlikely to halt support for the government advance until Damascus achieves its two main objectives: recapturing Aleppo and sealing the Turkish border, for years the lifeline for rebel-held areas.

That would amount to the most decisive victory of the war so far, and probably put an end to rebel hopes of removing Assad by force, their goal throughout five years of fighting that has killed 250,000 people and driven 11 million from their homes.

“The goal is to totally liberate Aleppo and then to seal the northern border with Turkey,” said Ivan Konovalov, director of the Center for Strategic Trend Studies in Moscow, explaining the Russian government thinking. “The offensive should not be stopped – that would be tantamount to defeat.”

“RISKS BEING ENDLESS”

Washington is leading its own air campaign against Islamic State militants in eastern Syria and northern Iraq, but has resisted calls to intervene in the main battlefields of Syria’s civil war in the west of the country, where the government is mostly fighting against other insurgent groups.

That has left the field to the Russians, who support Assad against an array of rebel groups backed by Turkey, Arab states and the West.

U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter drew a distinction between the two main zones of the conflict, saying Islamic State would have to be defeated “whatever happens with the Syrian civil war”.

In further evidence of the complexity of a multi-sided civil war that has drawn in regional and global powers, Russia provided air support for Kurdish fighters who overran a military air base that had been in the hands of Syrian rebels since 2013.

The Syrian Kurds have worked with the United States against Islamic State, but are opposed by Turkey, Washington’s NATO ally. The Kurds now appear to be taking advantage of the government advance to expand territory by capturing the Menagh base near the Turkish border.

One rebel commander, Zekeriya Karsli from the Levant Front, said: “The fall of Menagh airport has made the situation on the ground pretty grim.”

Saudi Arabia, which backs some of the rebels that Moscow is helping to defeat, has floated the idea of sending ground troops to help the U.S. effort against Islamic State. This was criticised by Russia’s Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, who said it could make the war permanent.

“All sides must be compelled to sit at the negotiating table instead of unleashing a new world war,” he told Germany’s Handelsblatt newspaper.

RUSSIANS AS MEDIATORS

Syria’s national reconciliation minister, Ali Haidar, suggested Moscow was playing a bigger role on the ground than just offering air strikes and military aid: Russian mediators were helping the government broker local deals with rebels willing to lay down weapons or relocate.

“The truth is that since the presence of the Russians on Syrian land, they can play the role of mediator in some areas,” Haidar told Reuters at his offices in Damascus.

The Russian-backed government assault has sent tens of thousands of people fleeing towards the Turkish border. The United Nations has said it fears for 300,000 people still trapped in Aleppo.

In a speech, President Tayyip Erdogan said Turkey’s patience may run out and Ankara may have to take action, but gave no details of what he meant. Erdogan called on the United Nations to prevent “ethnic cleansing”, saying as many as 600,000 more refugees could arrive.

The refugee crisis has had far-reaching impact across Europe, where Syrian refugees were the bulk of the biggest wave of migrants since World War Two to reach the European Union.

The NATO alliance announced a new sea mission to help Turkey and Greece crack down on criminal networks smuggling refugees from Turkey into Europe, after thousands drowned and hundreds of thousands made the journey last year.

Turkey has already taken in 2.6 million Syrians, the largest refugee population on earth, and has agreed to help keep them from travelling into Europe in return for aid. Erdogan warned that Turkey could “open the gates” for refugees into Europe if it did not receive enough help.

The United Nations and the European Union, which has agreed a 3-billion-euro fund to improve conditions for refugees in Turkey, have both urged Ankara to admit those fleeing the latest fighting.

“They struck Aleppo so we fled. First we escaped to another village. We’ve gone to every village. But they’re bombing everywhere so we came here,” said Musa Ibrahim Isa, one of the tens of thousands of people at Bab al-Salama, on the Syrian side of the border.

“Our only wish from God is that these gates be opened.”

(Additional reporting by Shadia Nasralla and Denis Dyomkin; Writing by Giles Elgood and Peter Graff; Editing by Peter Millership and Andrew Heavens)

Russia raises specter of permanent or ‘world war’ if Syria talks fail

MUNICH (Reuters) – Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev raised the specter of a permanent or a world war if powers failed to negotiate an end to the conflict in Syria and warned against any ground operations by U.S. and Arab forces.

Medvedev, speaking to Germany’s Handelsblatt newspaper on the eve of a security conference in Munich, said the United States and Russia must exert pressure on all sides in the conflict to secure a ceasefire.

Asked about Saudi Arabia’s offer last week to supply ground troops if a U.S.-led operation were mounted against Islamic State, he said:

“This is bad as a ground offensive usually turns the war into a permanent one. Just look at what happened in Afghanistan and many other countries. I don’t need to remind you what happened in poor Libya.”

“The Americans and our Arab partners must think well: do they want a permanent war?” It would be impossible to win such a war quickly, he said according to a German translation of his words, “especially in the Arab world, where everybody is fighting against everybody”.

“All sides must be compelled to sit at the negotiating table instead of unleashing a new world war.”

Russia is carrying out bombing sorties around the key city of Aleppo, in support of advances by troops loyal to President Bashar al-Assad. U.S. and other Western air forces are also involved in air strikes in northern Syria.

THE “PRIZE” OF ALEPPO

Capturing Aleppo, Syria’s biggest city before the war but now divided between rebel- and government-held sectors, would represent a major military victory for Assad and a symbolic prize for Russia.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Thursday that Moscow had submitted proposals for implementing a ceasefire in Syria and was waiting for a reaction from international powers.

Lavrov was speaking ahead of a meeting in Munich with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry to discuss Syria.

Members of the United Nations Security Council pressed Russia on Wednesday to stop bombing Aleppo in support of the Syrian military offensive and allow humanitarian access ahead of a meeting of major powers in Germany on the conflict.

“You have no one power that can act alone,” Medvedev said. “You have Assad and his troops on one side and some grouping, which is fighting against the government on the other side. It is all very complicated. It could last years or even decades. What’s the point of this?”

(Reporting by John Irish, reporting by Joseph Nasr; editing by Ralph Boulton)

Turkey president chastises U.S. over support for Syrian Kurds

ISTANBUL (Reuters) – Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan upbraided the United States for its support of Syrian Kurdish rebels on Wednesday, saying Washington’s inability to grasp their true nature had turned the region into a “sea of blood”.

Turkey should respond by implementing its own solution, he said, alluding to the creation of a safe zone in northern Syria – something Ankara has long wanted but a proposal that has failed to resonate with the United States and other NATO allies.

His comments, a day after Turkey summoned the U.S. ambassador over its support for Syrian Kurds, displayed Ankara’s growing frustration with Washington, which backs Syrian Kurdish rebels against Islamic State militants in Syria’s civil war.

Compounding tensions, the army said that one Turkish soldier had been killed and another wounded when security forces clashed with Kurdish militants crossing over from Syria.

Ankara regards the Syrian Kurdish PYD group as terrorists, citing their links to the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which has waged a three-decade-old insurgency for autonomy in the mainly Kurdish southeast of Turkey.

“Are you on our side or the side of the terrorist PYD and PKK organization?” Erdogan said in a speech in Ankara to provincial officials, addressing the United States.

He added that a U.S. failure to understand the essence of the PYD and PKK had caused a “sea of blood” and created a domestic security issue for Turkey.

“On the Syrian problem, which has become a part of our own domestic security, the time has come to implement our proposals for a solution, which everyone finds to be rational and right,” Erdogan said.

Turkey has repeatedly called for a “safe zone” or “no-fly zone” inside Syria. While some Western allies have voiced support in principle, the idea has gained no traction abroad because of concerns that it could bring the West into direct confrontation with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s forces.

Ankara summoned the U.S. ambassador to drive home its displeasure after State Department spokesman John Kirby said on Monday the United States did not regard the PYD as a terrorist organization.

Another attempt at Syria peace talks last month quickly succumbed to mounting advances against rebels by Assad’s forces backed by Russian air strikes, amid international disunity over how to end the war with global and regional powers supporting opposing sides.

REFUGEE INFLUX

As well as battling both a Kurdish insurgency and Islamic State, which has carried out several deadly bombings in Turkey, Ankara has been grappling with an influx of more than 2.5 million refugees since the 2011 start of Syria’s conflict.

Erdogan said that Turkish spending on food, accommodation and medical care for 280,000 Syrian refugees living in camps had reached $10 billion, while the United Nations had provided just $455 million.

On Tuesday evening, Turkish soldiers spotted seven PKK militants entering Sirnak province’s Cizre district from Syria and, during an ensuing clash, one soldier was killed and one wounded, the armed forces said in a statement.

The area of Syria near where the battle occurred is controlled by the Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD).

In a separate incident, a police officer was killed and another wounded when PKK rebels fired rockets at an armored vehicle in the town of Sirnak, state-run Anadolu Agency reported. It was not clear when that attack occurred.

Military sources said the army also seized up to 33 pounds of explosives and four suicide-bomber vests when it detained 34 people trying to cross into Turkey from a swathe of Syria under Islamic State control.

Turkey fears that advances by Syrian Kurds against Islamic State close to its 560-mile border with Syria will fuel separatist ambitions among its own Kurds.

A ceasefire between the PKK and the government collapsed in July following what the government said were attacks on security forces, plunging southeast Turkey into its worst violence since the 1990s and scuppering peace talks.

The PYD and PKK share not only ideology but fighters, with the PKK drawing Syrian Kurdish fighters to its camps in northern Iraq and Turkish Kurds serving in PYD ranks.

(Additional reporting by Tulay Karadeniz in Ankara, Ayla Jean Yackley and Asli Kandemir in Istanbul; Writing by David Dolan and Daren Butler; Editing by Mark Heinrich)

Russia, pressed to end Syria bombing, proposes March truce

UNITED NATIONS/DAMASCUS/ONCUPINAR, Turkey (Reuters) – World powers pressed Russia on Wednesday to stop bombing around Aleppo in support of a Syrian government offensive to recapture the city and a Western official said Moscow had presented a proposal envisaging a truce in three weeks’ time.

Secretary of State John Kerry is pushing for a ceasefire and more aid access to Aleppo, where rebel-held areas are being cut off and the United Nations has warned a new humanitarian disaster could be on the way.

Aid workers said on Wednesday the water supply to Aleppo, still home to two million people, was no longer functioning.

Kerry is hoping for agreement at a meeting in Munich on Thursday between Russia, the United States, Saudi Arabia, Iran and other powers, aimed at trying to revive peace negotiations that foundered earlier this month.

Syrian officials have indicated no plans to ease up the war effort. A Syrian military source said on Wednesday the battle for Aleppo, a major prize in a war which has killed a quarter of a million people, would continue in “all directions”.

Syrian Information Minister Omran al-Zoubi said the government expected a tough but relatively short battle to return the city to state control. “I do not expect the battle of Aleppo to go on long,” he told Reuters in Damascus.

A Western official said Russia had made a proposal to begin a ceasefire in Syria on March 1, but that Washington has concerns about parts of it and no agreement had been reached.

In Washington, a state department envoy told Congress the United States needs to consider options in case the diplomatic push does not succeed.

Asked how soon a ceasefire could be put in place, a Russian diplomat who declined to be identified said: “Maybe March, I think so.”

At a closed-door meeting of the 15-member U.N. Security Council on Wednesday, several members pressed Russia to end the Aleppo bombing sooner.

“The (Syrian) regime and its allies cannot pretend they are extending a hand to the opposition while with their other hand they are trying to destroy them,” French U.N. Ambassador Francois Delattre told reporters.

“CROSSED THE LINE”

Russian U.N. Ambassador Vitaly Churkin said Russian air strikes were being undertaken in a “transparent manner” and some Security Council members had “crossed the line” by politically exploiting humanitarian issues.

“They rather crudely use humanitarian matters in order to play, we believe, a destructive role as far as the political process is concerned,” said Churkin, adding that given the heightened interest in humanitarian issues, the council should also start regularly discussing Yemen and Libya.

One U.N. diplomatic source said Russia was “stringing Kerry along” in order to provide diplomatic cover for Moscow’s real goal – to help President Bashar al-Assad win on the battlefield instead of compromising at the negotiating table.

“It’s clear to everyone now that Russia really doesn’t want a negotiated solution but for Assad to win,” said the diplomatic source, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The Kremlin rejects claims that it has abandoned diplomacy in pursuit of a military solution, saying it would continue to providing military aid to Assad to fight “terrorist groups” and accusing Syria’s opposition of walking away from the talks.

FOOD, WATER SHORTAGES

Doctors working on both sides of the Syria-Turkey border say they have been overwhelmed by injuries caused by the air strikes, which Moscow says have only targeted Islamist militants but which Western countries say have caused widespread civilian casualties.

“We are increasingly seeing what we call multiple-trauma injuries because of the bombs and the heavy weapons they are using. There are large burn cases, lots of amputations, and internal traumas,” Mahmoud Mustafa, director of the Independent Doctors Association, told Reuters in Gaziantep, Turkey.

French charity Medecins Sans Frontiers (MSF), which runs six hospitals in Syria and provides support for another 153 health facilities across the country, said medical workers in the area north of Aleppo had been forced to flee for their lives.

“Yet again we are seeing healthcare under siege,” said Muskilda Zancada, MSF head of mission, Syria.

The International Committee of the Red Cross said it was delivering water to Aleppo because the city’s system was no longer working but that some supply routes for aid had been cut.

“The temperatures are extremely low and, without an adequate supply of food, water and shelter, displaced people are trying to survive in very precarious conditions,” the head of the ICRC in Syria, Marianne Gasser, said in a statement from Aleppo.

The latest fighting around Aleppo has killed about 500 people on all sides, a monitoring group said.

Medecins Sans Frontiers spokesman Sam Taylor said that while its own hospitals in Syria had not been hit, many others had.

“From the reports we get from MSF-supported facilities, the majority of hospitals are damaged or destroyed by aerial attacks,” he said. “In last two to three weeks we have definitely seen a trend of facilities being hit in the south and in the north.”

FABIUS QUESTIONS U.S. COMMITMENT

Saudi Arabia’s King Salman plans to visit Moscow in mid-March, Russia’s RIA news agency said, a meeting that would bring together the main sponsors of the opposing sides.

Saudi-backed rebels said they would go to Thursday’s meeting in Munich but would only go to U.N. peace talks in Geneva later this month if Russia stopped bombarding their positions and humanitarian aid reached civilians in the areas they control.

Opposition coordinator Riad Hijab said the Russian and Iranian intervention in Syria was bolstering the extremist threat in the Middle East, but the rebels would not give up.

On the ground, rebels say they are fighting for survival.

A commander of a Turkmen contingent within the Levant Front rebel group, Zekeria Karsli, said his men faced attacks on three fronts: Islamic State to the east, Syrian government forces to the south and Kurds to the west.

“Unfortunately the military situation on the battlefield is pretty bad. Russian planes are hitting us from the air and the Iranian/Assad block is hitting us from the ground,” he told Reuters near the Oncupinar border post.

He said Russian warplanes were carrying out hundreds of sorties every day and that the north of Aleppo city was encircled. But he said routes in to rebel-held parts of the city from Idlib province to the west were still open.

Opposition spokesman Salim al-Muslat said U.S. President Barack Obama could stop the Russian attacks. “If he is willing to save our children it is really the time now to say ‘no’ to these strikes in Syria.”

The rebels want anti-aircraft weapons so they can bring down the Russian planes that have been bombing intensely over the past four months.

But their Western and Arab backers have refused, fearing Islamic State militants could seize and use them against their own planes conducting air strikes against the jihadists, who have exploited the war to seize large parts of Syria and Iraq.

United Nations Syria envoy Staffan de Mistura has set a target date of Feb. 25 to reconvene talks between the Syrian government and opposition in Geneva.

But the offensive by Syrian forces, Hezbollah and Shiite militias directed by Iran – all backed by Russian bombing raids – have reversed opposition gains on the ground and encircled rebels inside Aleppo, a strategic prize now divided between government and opposition control.

“It’ll be easy to get a ceasefire soon because the opposition will all be dead,” a Western diplomat told Reuters. “That’s a very effective ceasefire.”

(Additional reporting by Warren Strobel in Munich, John Irish in Paris, Louis Charbonneau in New York, Parisa Hafezi in Ankara, Tom Miles and Stephanie Nebehay in Geneva, Jonathan Landay in Washington and Michelle Nichols in New York; writing by Philippa Fletcher; editing by Dominic Evans)

U.S. looks to shore up allies’ support to battle Islamic State

BRUSSELS (Reuters) – The United States said on Tuesday it hoped allies demonstrate a willingness to ramp up their contributions to the fight against Islamic State and to deterring Russia in eastern Europe during high-level defense talks in Brussels this week.

Defense Secretary Ash Carter said he plans to outline America’s plan to accelerate the campaign against Islamic State to defense chiefs from more than two dozen allies at talks on Thursday.

The United States has long-standing concerns that many allies are not contributing nearly enough to combat the jihadist group that has spread beyond its self-declared caliphate in parts of Iraq and Syria.

“I don’t think anybody’s satisfied with the pace of the (campaign), that’s why we’re all looking to accelerate it. Certainly the president isn’t (satisfied),” Carter told reporters traveling with him.

Washington has signaled the need for military and police trainers as well as contributions of special operations forces, including from Sunni Muslim Arab allies now expressing a new willingness to contribute.

“We have a very clear operational picture of how to do it. Now we just need the resources and the forces to fall in behind it,” he said, noting plans to capture Islamic State strongholds of Mosul in Iraq and Raqqa in Syria.

A top U.S. intelligence official told Congress on Tuesday that an Iraqi-led operation to retake Mosul is unlikely to take place this year.

The U.S. strategy in Syria is likely to come under intense scrutiny after four months of Russian air strikes have tipped momentum toward President Bashar al-Assad in Syria’s five-year-old civil war.

Defense chiefs were expected to discuss a major Syrian government offensive backed by Russia and Iran now underway near Aleppo that rebels say threatens the future of their insurrection.

DETERRING RUSSIA

On Wednesday, NATO defense ministers will begin outlining plans for a complex web of small eastern outposts, forces on rotation, regular war games and warehoused equipment ready for a rapid response force.

U.S. plans for a four-fold increase in military spending in Europe to $3.4 billion in fiscal year 2017 are central to the strategy, which has been shaped in response to Russia’s annexation of Crimea from Ukraine in 2014.

“I’ll be looking for others in NATO to echo (us) in our investment,” Carter said.

Carter said the plan aimed to move NATO to a “full deterrence posture” to thwart any kind of aggression.

“It’s not going to look like it did back in Cold War days but it will constitute, in today’s terms, a strong deterrent,” Carter said.

(Reporting by Phil Stewart; Editing by Alistair Bell)

U.N. fears for hundreds of thousands if Syria troops encircle Aleppo

GENEVA/DAMASCUS/ONCUPINAR, Turkey (Reuters) – Hundreds of thousands of civilians could be cut off from food if Syrian government forces encircle rebel-held parts of Aleppo, the United Nations said on Tuesday, warning of a new exodus of refugees fleeing a Russian-backed assault.

The army aims to secure the border with Turkey and recover control of Aleppo, a senior adviser to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad told Reuters, adding that she did not expect diplomacy to succeed while foreign states maintain support for insurgents.

Syrian government forces, backed by Russian air strikes and Iranian and Lebanese Hezbollah fighters, have launched a major offensive in the countryside around Aleppo, which has been divided between government and rebel control for years.

It marks one of the most important shifts of momentum in the five-year civil war that has killed 250,000 people and already driven 11 million from their homes.

Since last week, fighting has already wrecked the first attempt at peace talks for two years and led rebel fighters to speak about losing their northern power base altogether.

The U.N. is worried the government advance could cut off the last link for civilians in rebel-held parts of Aleppo with the main Turkish border crossing, which has long served as the lifeline for insurgent-controlled territory.

“It would leave up to 300,000 people, still residing in the city, cut off from humanitarian aid unless cross-line access could be negotiated,” the United Nations Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said.

If government advances around the city continue, it said, “local councils in the city estimate that some 100,000 – 150,000 civilians may flee”. Aleppo was once Syria’s biggest city, home to 2 million people.

Air strikes continued on Tal Rifaat, Anadan and other towns in the Aleppo countryside, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which monitors the war, and activists said, adding that they were almost certainly from Russian planes.

Independent Doctors’ Association official Mahmoud Mustafa said at least two people had been killed and 30 wounded in air strikes near Tal Rifaat and villages near Azaz. The death toll could be higher since his figures referred only to victims brought to the organization’s hospital on the Syrian side of the Oncupinar border crossing with Turkey.

In a residential area of Damascus, a suicide bomber drove his car into a police officers’ club on Tuesday, blowing himself up, a Syrian interior ministry statement said. The state news agency SANA reported three dead and 14 wounded.

The Observatory said eight police officers had been killed and 20 wounded in the blast. Islamic State claimed responsibility.

While mortar and missile attacks have been a common feature of life in Damascus, this was the first bombing of its kind in many months in the center of the capital.

Last month, at least 60 people were killed, including 25 Shi’ite fighters, on the outskirts of the city by a car bomb and two suicide bombers near Syria’s holiest Shi’ite shrine, the Observatory reported. Islamic State also claimed that attack.

“BETWEEN TWO EVILS”

Turkey, already home to 2.5 million Syrians, the world’s biggest refugee population, has so far kept its frontier mostly closed to the latest wave of displaced.

Trucks ferrying aid and building supplies were crossing the border at Oncupinar into Syria on Tuesday, while a few ambulances entered Turkey, sirens blazing.

But the crossing remained closed to the tens of thousands of refugees sheltering in camps on the Syrian side of the border.

“We Syrians will be stuck between two evils if Turkey does not open the doors,” said Khaled, 30, trying to return to Aleppo to rescue his wife and children. “We will have to choose between Russian bombardment or Daesh,” he said, using a pejorative Arabic acronym for Islamic State.

The U.N. urged Ankara on Tuesday to open the border and has called on other countries to assist Turkey with aid.

Assad adviser Bouthaina Shaaban, speaking at her office in Damascus, said the government’s aim was also “to control our borders with Turkey because Turkey is the main source of terrorists, and the main crossing for them”. The Syrian government describes all the groups fighting it as terrorists.

Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said as many as a million refugees could arrive if the Russian-Syrian campaign continues. Fifty thousand people had reached Turkey’s borders in the latest wave and Ankara was admitting people in a “controlled fashion”, he said.

The U.N. World Food Programme said in a statement it had begun food distribution in the Syrian town of Azaz near the Turkish border for the new wave of displaced people.

“The situation is quite volatile and fluid in northern Aleppo with families on the move seeking safety,” said Jakob Kern, WFP’s country director in Syria.

“We are extremely concerned as access and supply routes from the north to eastern Aleppo city and surrounding areas are now cut off, but we are making every effort to get enough food in place for all those in need, bringing it in through the remaining open border crossing point from Turkey.”

LITTLE HOPE FOR PEACE TALKS

The Russian-backed government assault around Aleppo, as well as advances further south, helped torpedo the first peace talks for nearly two years.

International powers are due to meet on Thursday in Munich in a bid to resurrect the talks, but diplomats hold out virtually no hope for negotiations as long as the offensive continues. Rebels say they will not attend without a halt to the bombing.

Moscow turned the momentum in the war in favor of its ally Assad when it joined the conflict four months ago with a campaign of air strikes against his enemies, many of whom are supported by Arab states, Turkey and the West.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry urged Russia on Tuesday to join efforts to bring about a ceasefire. “Russia’s activities from Aleppo and in the region are making it much more difficult to be able to come to the table and be able to have a serious conversation,” Kerry told reporters.

The Syrian president’s adviser said talk of a ceasefire was coming from states that “do not want an end to terrorism” and were instead seeking to shore up insurgents, who are losing territory on a number of important frontlines.

(Additional reporting by Suleiman al-Khalidi in Beirut, Tom Miles in Geneva, Gergely Szakacs and Marton Dunai in Budapest and Maria Tsvetkova in Moscow; writing by Peter Graff; editing by Giles Elgood, Philippa Fletcher and David Stamp)

Mass deaths in Syrian jails amount to crime of ‘extermination’, U.N. says

GENEVA (Reuters) – Detainees held by the Syrian government are being killed on a massive scale amounting to a state policy of “extermination” of the civilian population, a crime against humanity, United Nations investigators said on Monday.

The U.N. commission of inquiry called on the Security Council to impose “targeted sanctions” on high-ranking Syrian civilian and military officials responsible for or complicit in deaths, torture and disappearances in custody, but stopped short of naming the suspects.

The independent experts said they had also documented mass executions and torture of prisoners by two jihadi groups, the Nusra Front and Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL. These constituted war crimes and in the case of Islamic State also crimes against humanity, it said.

The report, “Out of Sight, Out of Mind: Deaths in Detention”, covers March 10, 2011 to November 30, 2015. It is based on interviews with 621 survivors and witnesses and evidence gathered by the team led by chairman Paulo Pinheiro.

“Over the past four and a half years, thousands of detainees have been killed while in the custody of warring parties,” the Commission of Inquiry on Syria said.

The U.N. criticism of the Damascus government comes at a time when its forces have been advancing with the aid of Russian air strikes. A Moscow-backed government assault near the city of Aleppo this month marks one of the biggest momentum shifts in the five year war and helped torpedo peace talks last week.

Pinheiro, noting that the victims were mostly civilian men, told a news briefing: “Never in these five years these facilities that are described in our report have been visited and we have repeatedly asked the government to do so.”

There was no immediate response by the government of President Bashar al-Assad, which has rejected previous reports.

“Prison officials, their superiors throughout the hierarchy, high-ranking officials in military hospitals and the military police corps as well as government were aware that deaths on a massive scale were occurring,” Pinheiro said.

“Thus we concluded there were ‘reasonable grounds’ – that is (the threshold) that we apply – to believe that the conduct described amounts to extermination as a crime against humanity.”

NAMES KEPT IN U.N. SAFE

Tens of thousands of detainees are held by the government atany one time, and thousands more have “disappeared” after arrest by state forces or gone missing after abduction by armed groups, the report said.

Through mass arrests and killing of civilians, including by starvation and denial of medical treatment, state forces have “engaged in the multiple commissions of crimes, amounting to a systematic and widespread attack against a civilian population”.

There were reasonable grounds to believe that “high-ranking officers”, including the heads of branches and directorates commanding the detention facilities and military police, as well as their civilian superiors, knew of the deaths and of bodies buried anonymously in mass graves.

They are thus “individually criminally liable”, the investigators said, calling again for Syria to be referred to the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), a decision that only the Security Council can take.

“It depends on the political will of states. Apparently for Syria now, there is none – there is total impunity, unfortunately,” said panel member Carla del Ponte.

“We are still waiting for a green light for international justice,” she said.

“The Security Council doesn’t do anything and can’t do anything because of the veto”, she added, a reference to Russia, Assad’s ally, which has repeatedly used its power as a permanent Council member to block resolutions against Damascus.

Over the past four years, the investigators have drawn up a confidential list of suspected war criminals and units from all sides which is kept in a U.N. safe in Geneva. Pinheiro said “we have included new names” but gave no details.

Del Ponte disclosed that the U.N. investigators have provided judicial assistance to various authorities in response to 15 requests for information on foreign fighters in Syria.

She declined to identify the countries involved, but later told Reuters: “These are low-level and middle-level perpetrators because they are foreign fighters, not high-ranking.”

The Nusra Front, which is allied to al Qaeda, and Islamic State, which has proclaimed a “caliphate” in swathes of Syria and Iraq, have committed mass executions of captured government soldiers and subjected civilians to “illicit trials” by Sharia courts which ordered death sentences, the report said.

“Due to their exclusive control of large territories and its centralized command and control structure the so-called ISIS established detention facilities as far as we know are in Raqqa, Deir al-Zor and Aleppo. Serious violations were documented in these facilities, including torture and mass executions,” Pinheiro said.

“Accountability for these and other crimes must form part of any political solution,” the investigators said, five days after U.N.-sponsored peace talks were suspended without any result.

DEAD BODIES

Raneem Matouq, daughter of prominent lawyer Khalil Matouq missing since Oct 2012, said she had been held for two months in 2014 at Military Security Damascus Branch 227 after being arrested for her own “peaceful activism” while a student.

Inmates at the detention facility, estimated to hold several thousand, have died as a result of torture, disease and appalling prison conditions, including chronic lack of food, according to the U.N. report.

“I was with 10 other girls in a room one-and-a-half metres long by two meters long. For guys it was a room the same scale but they had 30-40 men, with dead bodies,” Matouq told Reuters on a visit to Geneva last week with Amnesty International.

“It was full of insects, we were sleeping on the floor, there was no toilet,” she said. “We were allowed to go to the toilet three times a day, we called it ‘the picnic’ because we could walk outside.

“Sometimes we would find dead bodies inside the toilet (area). It was so horrible, they were all men.”

(Reporting by Stephanie Nebehay; editing by Ralph Boulton and Peter Graff)