NW Syria move does not violate any agreement: Moscow

By Elena Teslova

MOSCOW (AA) - Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said the Bashar al-Assad regime's capture of Khan Shaykhun in Syria does not violate any agreement.

"Syrian armed forces, with our support, do not violate any agreement," Lavrov told a joint news conference with his Angolan counterpart Manuel Domingos Augusto in Moscow on Monday.

Last Thursday, Syrian regime forces took control of northwestern Idlib province's Khan Shaykhun from opposition fighters with support of Iranian-backed foreign terrorist groups and Russian special forces.

"No one, at any time, agreed that attacks by terrorists would not be responded to,” he said. “The destruction of the terrorist hotbed in Khan Shaykhun by the Syrian army was done on a legal level and was inevitable in terms of the decisions taken by the UN Security Council on solving the problem in Syria.”

Russia and Turkey signed a memorandum of understanding last September calling for the “stabilization” of Idlib's de-escalation zone, suggesting that the opposition groups in Idlib will remain in areas in which they are already present, while Russia and Turkey will do joint patrols in the area with a view to preventing renewed fighting.

The regime and its allies, however, have consistently broken the terms of the cease-fire, launching frequent attacks inside the de-escalation zone.

The de-escalation zone is currently home to 4 million civilians, including hundreds of thousands recently displaced by regime forces throughout the war-weary country.

* Fatih Hafiz Mehmet contributed from Ankara.