Steinmeier renews call for Syria no-fly zone

German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier on Friday used a speech before the United Nations General Assembly to reiterate his proposal for a temporary stop to all military flights over Syria to pave the way for the resumption of a failed ceasefire.

Steinmeier said that the air force of Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad had to stop its airstrikes and that his ally, Moscow, had a responsibility in helping this to come about.

If the airstrikes did not cease, Steinmeier said, all political efforts to resolve the conflict would "be drowned in a hail of bombs."

His remarks come as fighting in Syria resumes with unabated intensity after a US-Russian-brokered ceasefire was declared by the Syrian army on Monday as having failed. The northwestern city of Aleppo has again become a focus of the conflict, with the rebel-held eastern districts of the city coming under heavy bombardment from both the Syrian and Russian air forces.

"While the world is struggling in New York to achieve a truce, Assad is continuing to bomb Aleppo into ruins," Steinmeier said, referring to several days of failed talks on restoring the ceasefire, attended by the top diplomats of the US and Russia.

He also warned against using the conflict "to redraw the political and ethnic map of the Middle East," saying that the external and inner borders of Syria had to be retained.

The French foreign minister, Jean-Marc Ayrault, had earlier accused the regime in Damascus of aiming to divide Syria with its offensive against Aleppo, saying it wanted to take back the "useful" part of the country, meaning the territory from Damascus in the south to Aleppo in the north.

'No alternative to US-Russian peace process'

Steinmeier's Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, for his part, used his speech to call for the salvaging of US-Russian agreements aimed at ending the war.

Lavrov said there was "no alternative" to the Russian and US-led peace process, saying it was "essential to prevent a disruption of these agreements."

He called for an "unbiased, impartial investigation of the incidents in Deir Ezzor and Aleppo that undermine these agreements," referring on the one hand to a US-led coalition strike on Syrian soldiers near Deir Ezzor, and on the other to an attack on an aid convoy in Aleppo province on Monday that left 21 people dead.

Washington has said the Deir Ezzor strike was "unintentional," and accuses Russia of being behind the Aleppo attack. Moscow and Damascus both deny involvement in the attack on the aid convoy, accusing "terrorists" - the name given by the Assad regime to all that oppose it - of having carried it out.

Opposite sides

Lavrov insisted that Russia's military intervention was helping to "prevent the collapse of statehood and disintegration of Syria" and thus further troubles across the Middle East.

He also called on Washington to rein in the opposition rebels it has been supporting.

"We will not be able to improve the humanitarian situation without the rooting out of the terrorist groups," he said.

The United States and Russia are on opposite sides in the Syrian conflict, with the US backing what it deems "moderate" rebels fighting Assad, while Russia is a longtime ally of the Damascus regime.

More than 400,000 people have died and 11 million been displaced in the five-and-a-half year war, which erupted in 2011 after government troops cracked down brutally on initially peaceful anti-Assad protests.

tj/jil (Reuters, AFP)