Accusing the Russians of being responsible for the deaths of dozens of children in an Aleppo air strike on Monday Syria's opposition coordinator, Riad Hijab, said that the opposition simply cannot negotiate with the Syrian regime of President Bashar al-Assad. "We want to negotiate, but to do that the conditions have to be there. We cannot negotiate with the regime when there are foreign forces bombing the Syrian people," Reuters quoted him as saying during talks with France's President Francois Hollande. "We do not want to go to negotiations that are condemned to failure before they start. We need to create the right climate," he added, "How could we negotiate with the Syrian people are dying? Each day there are massacres." Hollande echoed Hijab's view that "Assad has no role in the Syria of tomorrow." Hijab claims that 35 children were killed when a Russian air strike in Syria's contested Aleppo region. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group put the death toll at 12. The Russian strikes were directed against Injara, a town held by the anti-Assad opposition. More generally the Observatory estimates that Russian strikes have been responsible for 2,300 casualties in Syria one-third of whom have been civilians. Russia denies that its strikes have caused any civilian casualties in Syria.
