Syria has decided to cede control of its chemical weapons because of a Russian proposal and not the threat of US military intervention, Interfax news agency quotes President Bashar al-Assad as saying in a Russian television interview. 
 
 Assad made the statement in an interview with Russian state TV which was televised on Thursday, as John Kerry, US secretary of state, landed in the Swiss city of Geneva to meet his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov and discuss how UN can secure and destroy Assad's chemical weapons. 
 
 "Syria is placing its chemical weapons under international control because of Russia. The US threats did not influence the decision," Interfax quoted Assad as telling Russia's state-run Rossiya-24 channel. 
 
 Assad also told Rossiya-24 that Syria would in the next few days submit documents to the UN for an agreement governing the handover of its chemical arsenal, state-run Russian news agency RIA reported on Thursday. 
 
 The UN on Thursday confirmed it had recieved a document from Syria. 
 
 "In the past few hours we have received a document from the government of Syria which is being translated," Farhan Haq, a UN spokesman, said. 
 
 Assad said after the papers were submitted "work will start that will lead to the signing of the convention prohibiting chemical weapons". 
 
 Rossiya-24 did not immediately air the interview and it was not clear when it was recorded. 
 
 Syria, which denies it was behind an August 21 poison-gas attack in Damascus, has agreed to the US proposal that it give up its chemical weapons stocks, averting what would have been the first direct Western intervention in a war that has killed more than 100,000 people. 
 
 Assad appeared to continue this denial by saying that countries that supplied chemical weapons to "terrorists" in Syria should held responsible. He also called for an "in-depth investigation" into the use of chemical weapons in Syria. 
 
 Putin's op-ed 
 
 For his part, Vladimir Putin has said the Russian initiative will not succeed unless the US abandons plans for potential air strikes to punish Assad for the chemical-weapons attack which US President Barack Obama blames on Syrian government forces. 
 
 The Russian president directly appealed to the American people and to US politicians on Thursday by writing an article in the New York Times warning that a military strike could unleash a new wave of "terrorism". 
 
 Qadri Jamil, Syria's deputy prime minister, went a step further on Thursday and said that the Russian proposal will only succeed if the US and its allies pledge not to attack Syria in the future. 
 
 "We want a pledge that neither it [the US] nor anyone else will launch an aggression against Syria," Jamil told the Associated Press news agency in Damascus. 
 
 Jamil was responding to a question on his expectations from Thursday's meeting between Kerry and Lavrov. 
 
 Kerry and a team of US experts will have at least two days of meetings with their Russian counterparts in Geneva. 
 
 They hope to emerge with an outline of how about 1,000 tonnes of chemical weapons stocks and precursor materials as well as potential delivery systems can be safely inventoried and isolated under international control in an active war zone and then destroyed. 
 
 Rossiya 24 did not give any further details of the content of the interview, which it said would be broadcast in full "soon". 
 
 While news of the Assad interview was released, Syria's main rebel commander Salim Idris, in a statement carried on pan-Arab satellite channel, called for regime officials to be put on trial. 
 
 "We call upon the international community, not only to withdraw the chemical weapons, that were the tool of the crime, but to hold accountable those who committed the crime in front of the International Criminal Court," he said. 
 
 Surge in clashes 
 
 Idris said his Free Syrian Army "categorically rejects the Russian initiative" as falling short of the expectations of rebel fighters. 
 
 Against this backdrop of diplomatic developments, violence has raged on in different parts of Syria. 
 
 A surge of clashes in the country's oil-producing northeast has killed dozens of rebels and Kurdish fighters in the past two days, activists said on Thursday. 
 
 Fighters from Syria's ethnic Kurdish minority - roughly 10 percent of the 23-million-strong population - have carved out an increasingly autonomous region near the frontiers with Iraq and Turkey. 
 
 Elsewhere, air force jets bombed one of the main hospitals serving rebel-held territory in the north, according to activists and video footage. 
 
 Eleven civilians, including two doctors, were killed in the strike against the hospital on Wednesday in the town of al-Bab, 30km northeast of Aleppo city, the opposition Aleppo Media Centre said on Thursday. 
 
 Video footage posted on YouTube showed the limp body of a young child being carried out of the hospital by a man. 
 
 The Aleppo Media Centre said that the emergency and radiology departments were destroyed in the attack. 
 
 The government has not commented on the strike but state news agency SANA said on Thursday that the army had killed 14 "terrorists" - a term it uses for rebels - north of al-Bab in an operation on a convoy. ||||| U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry is rejecting Syrian President Bashar Assad's suggestion Thursday that he begin submitting data on his chemical weapons arsenal one month after signing an international chemical weapons ban. 
 
 Speaking at a news conference with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, Kerry noted that Assad said a 30-day lead time would be standard. 
 
 "There is nothing standard about this process," Kerry said, because Assad has used his chemical weapons. 
 
 "The words of the Syrian regime in our judgment are simply not enough." 
 
 Kerry cautioned that a U.S. military strike could occur if Assad doesn't agree to dismantle his chemical arsenal properly. 
 
 He said, "There ought to be consequences if it doesn't take place." 
 
 Lavrov said the dismantling "will make unnecessary any strike against the Syrian Arab Republic." ||||| GENEVA/UNITED NATIONS The United States and Russia began high-stakes talks on Thursday on Moscow's plan for Syria to surrender its chemical weapons as Damascus formally applied to join a global poison gas ban, but Secretary of State John Kerry underscored that U.S. military force may still be necessary if diplomacy fails. 
 
 "This is not a game," Kerry said in an appearance with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov after opening talks in Geneva aimed at fleshing out Russia's plan to secure and dispose of Syria's stockpiles of chemical arms. 
 
 The talks were part of a diplomatic push that prompted President Barack Obama to put on hold plans for U.S. air strikes in response to a chemical weapons attack on civilians near Damascus on August 21. 
 
 The United States and its allies say Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's forces carried out the attack with sarin nerve gas, killing more than 1,400 people, including 400 children. Russia and Assad blame rebel forces. 
 
 The United Nations said it received a document from Syria on joining the global anti-chemical weapons treaty, a move Assad promised as part of a deal to avoid U.S. air strikes. 
 
 The move would end Syria's status as one of only seven nations outside the 1997 international convention that outlaws stockpiling chemical weapons. Other holdouts include neighbours Egypt and Israel, as well as North Korea. 
 
 The United States immediately warned Syria against stalling tactics to avoid military strikes. Assad told Russian state television in an interview broadcast on Thursday he would finalise plans to abandon his chemical arsenal only when the United States stops threatening to attack him. 
 
 Kerry expressed some optimism about the talks in Geneva - expected to last two days - saying, "We do believe there is a way to get this done" and that the United States was "grateful" for ideas put forward by Russia to resolve the crisis. 
 
 But he and Lavrov differed sharply on U.S. military threats. 
 
 "We proceed from the fact that the solution of this problem will make unnecessary any strike on the Syrian Arab Republic," Lavrov said during the appearance with Kerry. 
 
 Russian President Vladimir Putin's Russia has been Assad's most powerful backer during the civil war, which has killed more than 100,000 people since 2011, delivering arms and - with China - blocking three U.N. resolutions meant to pressure Assad. 
 
 "President Obama has made clear that should diplomacy fail, force might be necessary to deter and degrade Assad's capacity to deliver these weapons," Kerry asserted. 
 
 "Only the credible threat of force - and the intervention of President Putin and Russia based on that - has brought the Assad regime to acknowledge for the first time that it even has chemical weapons and an arsenal, and that (it) is now prepared to relinquish it," Kerry added. 
 
 Kerry said any agreement must be comprehensive, verifiable, credible and implemented in a "timely" way - "and finally, there ought to be consequences if it doesn't take place." Kerry called a peaceful resolution "clearly preferable" to military action. 
 
 A version of the Russian plan that leaked to the newspaper Kommersant described four stages: Syria would join the world body that enforces a chemical weapons ban, declare production and storage sites, invite inspectors, and then decide with the inspectors how and by whom stockpiles would be destroyed. 
 
 'LEGALLY SPEAKING' 
 
 Syria has agreed to a Russian proposal that it give up its chemical weapons stocks, averting what would have been the first direct Western intervention in the civil war. 
 
 "Legally speaking, Syria has become, starting today, a full member of the (chemical weapons) convention," Syrian U.N. Ambassador Bashar Ja'afari told reporters in New York after submitting documents to the United Nations. 
 
 Several U.N. diplomats and a U.N. official told Reuters on condition of anonymity that it was not yet clear that Syria had fulfilled all the conditions for legal accession to the treaty. 
 
 "The chemical weapons in Syria are a mere deterrence against the Israeli nuclear arsenal," Ja'afari said as he waved a document he called a CIA report on Israeli chemical weapons. 
 
 "And now the time has come for the Syrian government to join the (convention) as a gesture to show our willingness to be against all weapons of mass destruction," Ja'afari added. 
 
 Dressed in a white shirt and dark suit and seated in a wood-panelled office, Assad said in his TV interview that Syria opted to cede control of its chemical weapons because of a Russian proposal and not the threat of U.S. military intervention. 
 
 Assad said in comments translated into Russian, "When we see the United States really wants stability in our region and stops threatening, striving to attack, and also ceases arms deliveries to terrorists, then we will believe that the necessary processes can be finalised." 
 
 Syria is already bound by the separate Geneva accords that have banned the use of chemical weapons in warfare for nearly a century, but it had never been required before this week to disclose whether it possessed them. Western nations believe Syria has vast stockpiles of poison gas. 
 
 Assad said Syria would provide an accounting of chemical weapons stocks in 30 days, standard practice under the treaty. 
 
 Kerry questioned the offer. "We believe there is nothing standard about this process at this moment because of the way the regime has behaved - not only the existence of these weapons but they have been used," Kerry said. "And the words of the Syrian regime, in our judgment, are simply not enough." 
 
 Kerry and Lavrov flew to Geneva with delegations of chemical weapons and nonproliferation experts to begin to hammer out how to identify, secure and neutralise Syria's chemical weapons. 
 
 A draft U.N. Security Council Resolution submitted by France this week demands that Syria declare its chemical weapons holdings within 15 days, and holds out the threat of sanctions or military force if it fails to disarm. 
 
 HOSPITAL BOMBED 
 
 While the diplomats met in Switzerland, the war ground on relentlessly in Syria. Activists said Syrian warplanes bombed one of the main hospitals serving rebel-held territory in the north of the country, killing at least 11 civilians including two doctors. 
 
 Video footage showed the limp body of a young child being carried out of the hospital by a man. Another boy lay on the floor, blood on his head and dust covering his body. 
 
 Assad's opponents were also accused of atrocities. An anti-Assad monitoring group, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, said Sunni Muslim Islamist rebels killed 22 members of Assad's Alawite minority sect in a massacre after storming a village east of the central city of Homs. 
 
 Dozens of people have also been killed in the past two days of fighting in the oil-producing northeast of the country, where Sunni Arab rebels are battling members of the Kurdish minority in a fight among factions opposed to Assad. 
 
 U.S. officials criticised Putin over his remarks in an opinion piece in the New York Times. 
 
 Putin said it was alarming that U.S. foreign military intervention had become "commonplace" He also rejected Obama's assertions of "American exceptionalism," saying, "It is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional, whatever the motivation. 
 
 White House spokesman Jay Carney told reporters: "The fact is that Russia offers a stark contrast that demonstrates why America is exceptional. Unlike Russia, the United States stands up for democratic values and human rights in our own country and around the world. And we believe that our global security is advanced when children cannot be gassed to death by a dictator." 
 
 (Reporting by Warren Strobel and Stephanie Nebehay in Geneva, Thomas Grove, Gabriela Baczynska and Steve Gutterman in Moscow, Michelle Nichols and Louis Charbonneau in New York, Paul Eckert and Arshad Mohammed in Washington, and Daren Butler in Istanbul; Writing by Will Dunham; Editing by Peter Cooney)
– John Kerry and Russia's foreign minister began wrangling over the details of Moscow's plan to defuse the Syria crisis today, as Bashar al-Assad publicly embraced the idea and simultaneously zinged the US: "Syria is placing its chemical weapons under international control because of Russia," he said in an interview with Russian state TV, reports al-Jazeera. "The US threats did not influence the decision." Assad said Syria would formally sign an international ban on chemical weapons, and the UN said after the interview aired that it had received the paperwork, reports Reuters. "This is a two-sided process and we are counting, first of all, on the United States to stop conducting the policy of threats regarding Syria," said Assad, who added that Syria would begin submitting data a month after signing the weapons pact. That's not good enough, said Kerry in opening remarks at his US-Russian summit with Sergei Lavrov, reports AP. Noting that Assad had called the 30-day period "standard," Kerry argued that "there is nothing standard about this process" because chemical weapons were actually used. He still held out the possibility of a military strike if the dismantling doesn't take place, but Lavrov said the Russian plan "will make unnecessary any strike against the Syrian Arab Republic." (Click to read about Vladimir Putin's much-discussed op-ed today.)