MOSCOW/BEIRUT--Moscow stepped up its war of words with Washington on Sunday, saying air strikes by a U.S.-led coalition on the Syrian army threatened the implementation of a U.S.-Russian ceasefire plan for Syria and bordered on connivance with Islamic State.
The diplomatic dispute heated up on the last day of a seven-day ceasefire marred by a surge of violence as warplanes hit the strategic northern city of Aleppo for the first time since the truce came into effect.
In another blow to hopes for the ceasefire, the governor of Homs said several hundred rebels would be evacuated from the last rebel-held district of the Syrian city on Monday, prompting rebels to warn any such step would amount to the government declaring the end of the truce.
On Saturday, the Russian Defence Ministry said U.S. jets had killed more than 60 Syrian soldiers in the eastern Syrian city of Deir al-Zor in four air strikes by two F-16 and two A-10 fighter jets coming from the direction of Iraq. Syrian U.N. Ambassador Bashar Ja'afari charged that U.S.-led strikes were aimed at torpedoing the ceasefire but France's foreign minister, speaking in New York, placed the main blame for truce violations on President Bashar al Assad's government.
The Britain-based monitoring group Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said a military source at Deir al-Zor airport reported at least 90 Syrian soldiers were killed in the strikes.
A U.S. official said the U.S. military believed reports that about 60 Syrian troops were killed but declined to speculate on the number of wounded. Two U.S. officials also confirmed that a tank was among the vehicles hit in the strike, raising more questions about what kind of intelligence led the coalition aircraft to conclude Islamic State militants were operating the military equipment.
"The actions of coalition pilots - if they, as we hope, were not taken on an order from Washington - are on the boundary between criminal negligence and connivance with Islamic State terrorists," Russia's Foreign Ministry said in a statement. "We strongly urge Washington to exert the needed pressure on the illegal armed groups under its patronage to implement the ceasefire plan unconditionally. Otherwise the implementation of the entire package of the U.S.-Russian accords reached in Geneva on Sept. 9 may be jeopardized."
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry in turn told CNN that Russia should do more to support the ceasefire and "stop the grandstanding, stop the showboating and get the humanitarian assistance going."
Kerry called Saturday's incident a "terrible thing ... that we all acknowledge and regret."
Russia, which support's Assad along with Iran, has called on Washington to press the moderate Syrian opposition to separate itself from Islamic State and other "terrorist groups."
Iran also condemned the U.S. military action. "Such moves indicate America supports terrorist groups in Syria," a foreign ministry spokesman said, according to Iranian news agencies.
In Venezuela, Syrian U.N. Ambassador Bashar Ja'afari said the U.S.-led coalition strikes were intended to sink the ceasefire.
French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault said that despite the strikes on the Syrians, Syrian government forces were principally behind the truce violations. The U.S. military said the coalition stopped the attacks against what it believed to be Islamic State positions in northeast Syria after Russia informed it that Syrian forces may have been hit.
"The White House is defending Islamic State. Now there can be no doubts about that," Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said in comments aired by state TV.
The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power, said Zakharova should be embarrassed by that claim. Russia's U.N. representative, Vitaly Churkin, said Russia had no "specific evidence" of U.S. collusion with Islamic State.
