Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov says his country will throw its weight behind Syria’s action in the United Nations Security Council against the US-led coalition purportedly fighting the Daesh Takfiri terrorist group, demanding an end to the aerial assaults against civilian facilities.
“The coalition regularly hits wrong targets while civilians become victims and civilian infrastructure facilities become victims. This is not a new trend,” Lavrov said at a news conference in Moscow on Wednesday.
He added, “We will support Syria in the Security Council. We will also defend the appeals by all other countries that have suffered from the lawlessness committed by the presence of extra-regional military forces on their territories.”
On Tuesday, the Syrian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Expatriates, in two separate letters addressed to UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres and the rotating president of the Security Council, Anatolio Ndong Mba, denounced the coalition strikes conducted against al-Baghouz town a day earlier, saying the US-led warplanes had pounded a refugee camp.
Local sources, requesting anonymity, told state-run Ikhbariyah Syria television news network that 16 civilians, including seven children, were killed as a result of the raid.
“This new crime is in line with the series of war crimes and crimes against humanity, which the US-led coalition has perpetrated against Syrian people, its continued support for terrorism, and its use of terrorists and separatist militia forces to advance its fiendish plots aimed at Syria’s sovereignty, unity and territorial integrity,” said the letters.
The ministry also called on the UN Security Council to stand up against such attacks and crimes.
It also demanded that the Council assume its responsibilities regarding the establishment of international peace and security, conduct an international probe into these criminal acts, condemn them, and put an immediate halt to these air raids as well as the “aggressive” presence of US and other foreign military forces on the Syrian soil.
Local sources, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Syria’s official news agency SANA on Tuesday that at least 70 civilians, mostly women and children, had lost their lives and sustained injuries when US-led airstrikes targeted the outskirts of al-Baghouz town in Syria’s troubled eastern province of Dayr al-Zawr.
The sources added that the airstrikes hit a makeshift camp, which internally displaced people had set up in the area after fleeing fierce exchanges of gunfire between the US-led coalition and the last remnants of the Daesh Takfiri terrorist group.
The US-led coalition has been conducting airstrikes and operations against what are said to be Daesh targets inside Syria since September 2014 without any authorization from the Damascus government or a United Nations mandate.
The military alliance has repeatedly been accused of targeting and killing civilians. It has also been largely incapable of achieving its declared goal of destroying Daesh.
Syria has on numerous occasions condemned airstrikes by the US-led coalition, asking the UN to force Washington and its allies to put an end to their military intervention in the Arab country.