Agence France-Presse (AFP) on Thursday conveyed reports that forces loyal to Syria’s Bashar al-Assad regime had “rained barrels bombs on Aleppo” over the course of the day, part of what the wire described as “a campaign against rebels in the northern city where dozens have been killed this week”:
The use of the helicopter-deployed, shrapnel-packed IEDs – which can level entire buildings with a single explosion – has been condemned as “barbaric”by Secretary of State John Kerry and as a “war crime” by British Foreign Secretary William Hague.
Meanwhile The Hill reported that the United Nations has admitted that the regime will fail to meet the June 30 deadline under which it was supposed to turn over its chemical weapons (CWs), part of a deal hammered out last year to avert what had widely been expected to be impending Western strikes:
“It is imperative that the Syrian Arab Republic concludes the remaining removal operations as quickly as possible, as the authorities have pledged to do,” U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon informed the Security Council in a letter sent last week and obtained Thursday by The New York Times.
“However, it is now evident that some activities related to the elimination of the chemical weapons program of the Syrian Arab Republic will continue beyond 30 June 2014,” he added.
The letter reported that one of Syria’s 12 chemical weapons storage facilities remained open, and that only five of 18 production facilities had been shuttered
The conventional and nonconventional dynamics have converged as the Syrian war has begun to reemerge as a proxy for the administration’s foreign policy credibility.
TIME Magazine’s chief foreign affairs correspondent Michael Crowley assessed last Friday that the issue seems set to “again test [President Barack Obama’s] credibility, and renew talk of U.S. military action in Syria.” A Wednesday speech given by the president was broadly criticized for being insufficiently clear regarding Washington’s stance toward the over three-year war.
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