UNITED NATIONS, January 10. /TASS/. The humanitarian situation in Syria’s Raqqa is close to a disaster, though everyone is putting the best face on matters, Russian Permanent Representative to the United Nations Vasily Nebenzya said on Tuesday.

"The humanitarian situation in Raqqa is awful, but everyone is playing it cool. Our American colleagues levelled the city to the ground as they were fighting ISIS (the former name of IS, Islamic State, a terrorist group outlawed in Russia - TASS) there, and currently the whole city is rigged with explosives, full of corpses of killed people, lacking water, electricity and any medical facilities. Nothing is going on, the city is not being restored, people cannot come back, living in awful unbelievable conditions in refugee camps," the diplomat said.

According to Nebenzya, the current state of affairs in Raqqa is "a humanitarian situation close to a humanitarian disaster." He added that western countries place emphasis on what is going on in the Syrian province of Idlib where the Syrian army is carrying out an operation against terrorists, and in Eastern Guta, a suburb of Damascus. "They discuss what they are interested in," he noted.

A stronghold of the Islamic State terrorist group, Raqqa was liberated on October 17 by Arab and Kurdish units of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).