U.S. scolds Russia over Syria bombing

 The Obama administration says Russia has a "special responsibility" to help stop the bombing in Syria.
The Russians, though, don't seem to be listening.

In a call on Monday, Secretary of State John Kerry urged Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov to push Syrian President Bashar Assad's regime to stop attacking the city of Aleppo and the suburbs of Damascus.
State Department spokesman Mark Toner said stopping the airstrikes in those two areas was key to shoring up a patchy cease-fire in the Arab country and allowing the resumption of peace talks aimed at ending its five-year-old conflict.

Russia, Assad's most powerful foreign backer, "has a special responsibility in this regard to press the regime to end its offensive attacks and strikes that kill civilians," Toner said.
The U.S. also alleged that Assad, who is bent on staying in power against an array of opposition forces as well as terrorist networks, was blocking civilian access to humanitarian supplies, and it urged Russia to help ease those blockades.
The readout from the State Department didn't mention Lavrov's response, and the Russian Embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
However, in its own take on the conversation, the Russian Foreign Ministry said Lavrov and Kerry discussed a proposal by Moscow for joint Russian-U.S. operations against terrorist groups and "other illegal armed groups" in Syria.
The Obama administration, eager to keep Americans out of the fight against Assad, has dismissed the idea of joint operations, and Toner again did so during his press briefing Monday.
The U.S. and Russia's likelihood of agreeing on which of the many groups fighting the Assad regime count as "terrorists" is fairly low, and it's been a major stumbling block to keeping the cease-fire intact.
Assad, whom the Russians have backed through their own air power, considers pretty much anyone fighting to overthrow him a terrorist.
The U.S. prefers to reserve that term for groups such as the Al-Qaeda affiliated Jabhat al-Nusra or the Islamic State, neither of which are included in the cease-fire that first took hold in late February.
The Islamic State took responsibility for bombings Monday in the town of Jabla and the port city of Tartus; dozens of civilians were killed or wounded in the attacks, which the U.S. condemned.