The State Department on Wednesday on called on Russia to honor its prior commitments and stop bombing Syrian civilians, a request it made just hours after the United Nations suspended Syria peace talks until later this month.
State Department spokesman John Kirby confirmed reports of Russian airstrikes in the Syrian city of Aleppo and the surrounding area.
Press reports have indicated that those strikes were aimed at opposition rebels, not the Islamic State. When it intervened military in Syria’s civil war last year, Moscow insisted it would focus most of bombing campaigns on Islamic State strongholds, but it has repeatedly aimed its airstrikes on U.S.-backed Syrian rebels.
“Again, we call on Russia to concentrate their military energy in Syria on Daesh, a common enemy to the entire international community, and not on the opposition and innocent civilians,” Kirby said, referring to the Islamic State as Daesh, another name for the extremist terrorist group.
Kirby also restated U.N. Security Council Resolution 2254, which calls for all parties to take the “appropriate steps” to protect civilians, and noted that the Russians voted for it.
The resolution, Kirby said, called on the Assad regime and all parties to cease bombing and all attacks on civilians “not eventually, but immediately. Not soon, but now.”
“It’s difficult in the extreme to see how strikes against civilian targets contribute in any way to the peace process now being explored,” he said.
U.N. envoy Steffan di Mistura earlier Wednesday paused the talks in Geneva in part because of the difficulty of trying to seek a political solution while Russia is continually disrupting attempts to deliver humanitarian aid to civilians.
The main Syria opposition group, the High Negotiation Committee, traveled to Geneva over the weekend to potentially participate in preliminary peace talks, but the group balked when Russia continued its bombing campaign on rebel groups.
