by Tyler Durden
Sep 18, 2016 11:00 AM
Update 4: The Obama administration officially expressed it's "regret" for an airstrike that killed Syrian forces with a senior White House official saying "The United States has relayed our regret through the Russian Federation for the unintentional loss of life of Syrian forces."
Meanwhile, the U.S. UN envoy called Russia's request for an emergency Security Council meeting a "stunt."
Russia's U.N. Ambassador Vitaly Churkin responded by saying that the U.S. airstrike that struck Syrian government troops has put "a very big question mark" over the future of the U.S. and Russian-brokered cease-fire agreement in Syria adding that in his decades as a diplomat he had"never seen such an extraordinary display of American heavy-handedness as we are witnessing today."
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Update 3: Russia's foreign ministry says it has "reached the terrifying conclusion" that the US is conniving with the Islamic State. As ABC reports, Russia has called for an emergency session of the United Nations Security Council over a U.S. air raid that it says struck Syrian troops battling the Islamic State group. Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova says Moscow is demanding "full and detailed explanations about whether this was deliberate support of the Islamic State or another mistake."
Zakharova was quoted by the state news agency Tass as saying that "after today's attack on the Syrian army, we come to the terrible conclusion that the White House is defending the Islamic State."
The U.S. military says it halted an air raid against IS in eastern Syria after it was informed by Russia that it might have struck Syrian troops. If confirmed, it would be the first American strike on President Bashar Assad's forces in the five-year-old conflict. The allegations come as Moscow and Washington are already at loggerheads over a five-day-old Syrian cease-fire, with each accusing the other of failing to fully implement it.
It appears this major diplomatic scandal is only starting to play out.
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