U.S. Officials Say Russia May Have Been Responsible for Convoy Attack

The Obama administration thinks there is a high probability that Russian airstrikes were responsible for the deadly bombing of a United Nations humanitarian aid convoy, United States officials said Tuesday.

The officials said that the administration wants to allow Moscow the time and space to investigate and announce its own conclusions about the bombing on Monday, which destroyed much of a 31-truck convoy that had been authorized to travel to a rebel-held area in northern Syria.

Aghast at the attack, United Nations officials on Tuesday suspended all aid convoys in the war-ravaged country, describing the bombing as a possible war crime and calling the bombers cowards.

The attack threatened to completely unravel a fragile agreement between Russia and the United States, which support opposite sides in the Syria conflict, and neither the Russians nor the Americans were ready to publicly blame each other.

American officials had initially suggested that either Syrian or Russian warplanes had carried out the attack. But speaking on the condition of anonymity because they were discussing intelligence information, they said it appeared that Russian aircraft were responsible.

“We have no indication that anything other than Russian tactical aircraft were in the air at the time the convoy was struck, to include both strike and reconnaissance aircraft,” said an American official. “We have seen no indication that it was anything other than an airstrike.”

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