The White House still has no effective plan to stop it and there are no good options either, experts said. Moscow marked the anniversary on Friday by signaling it will ramp up its bombardments alongside the Syrian government against Aleppo, the last stronghold of opposition rebels.
Syrian civil defense volunteers, known as the White Helmets, pass the body of a boy after he was pulled from the rubble following a government forces airstrike on the rebel-held al-Shaer neighborhood of Aleppo
More than 250,000 people are trapped in the ravaged city, where the bombings have decimated critical sites, including water supplies, refugee camps, hospitals and humanitarian aid supplies. The strikes even targeted an underground playground, according to the White House. After speaking by phone on Friday, U.S. President Barack Obama and German Chancellor Angela Merkel called the attacks "barbarous."
Humanitarian aid
Yet the White House has continued to express hope that Moscow would press the Assad government to uphold a cease-fire and allow the flow of humanitarian aid to terrorized populations in Aleppo and elsewhere. A U.S.-Russia brokered cease-fire fell apart last month, after Russia and Syria launched the air offensive against opposition rebels in a bid to push them out of major urban areas. The bombardments have pushed diplomatic engagement between Moscow and Washington to the brink. On Friday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov called U.S. threats to break engagement over the Syria bombings “unacceptable and deplorable.”
People dig in the rubble in an ongoing search for survivors at a site hit previously by an airstrike in the rebel-held Tariq al-Bab neighborhood of Aleppo, Syria
A telephone conversation between U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Lavrov on Friday yielded no progress. “We are at the same place,” State Department spokesman Mark Toner said. U.S. diplomatic engagement with Russia “is on life support, but it has not flat-lined yet,” Toner said. “We want to make sure that we understand the stakes and that Russia understands the stakes, more importantly." The Obama administration has continued to look for ways to “alleviate the suffering in Syria,” but the options “are not very good,” Toner said.
No major shift by US
