WASHINGTON/BEIRUT: The United States denied Tuesday that it was coordinating airstrikes with the Syrian regime against Islamist militants and renewed its insistence that President Bashar Assad must step down.

In an interview with the BBC, Assad said Damascus was being informed about the U.S.-led coalition airstrikes against ISIS through messages conveyed via a third party.

Assad said the communication was through third parties, including neighboring Iraq, where Washington and Western allies are also carrying out strikes against ISIS.

Before the strikes were launched in Syria in September, Washington did “inform the Syrian regime directly of our intent to take action through our ambassador to the United Nations,” said State Department spokeswoman Jan Psaki, repeating information given at the time.

“We did not request the regime’s permission. We did not coordinate our actions with the Syrian government,” she said.

“We did not provide advance notifications to the Syrians at a military level, nor give any indication of our timing on specific targets.”

Washington had also warned Damascus “not to engage U.S. aircraft.”

Psaki refused to lay out any conversations with the Iraqi government and said the US did not pass on its plans every time, although she dodged a question about whether Damascus had only been informed once, in September.

The U.S. position remains that “Assad has lost all legitimacy and must go ... There cannot be a stable inclusive Syria under Assad’s leadership,” Psaki added.

She also insisted that his interview with the BBC had to be “taken with a grain of salt.”

In the same interview, “he denied the use of barrel bombs, chlorine and also the indiscriminate killing of his own people,” Psaki said.

“I know about the army, they use bullets, missiles and bombs. I haven’t heard of the army using barrels, or maybe cooking pots,” Assad said, apparently making light of the allegations put to him.

Pressed again about their use, he replied: “They’re called bombs ... There is no barrel bombs, we don’t have barrels.”

At least 10 civilians were killed in regime bombardment in Waer in Homs Tuesday, and in Hama, according to the pro-opposition Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which tracks the war using a network of sources on the ground. 

United Arab Emirates fighter planes roared out of an air base in Jordan Tuesday to pound ISIS militant positions, marking a return to combat operations by one of the United States’ closest Arab allies in the fight against the extremists.

The Emirates’ decision to launch fresh airstrikes from the kingdom after a more-than-month-long hiatus was a strong show of support for Western-allied Jordan, which has vowed a punishing response to the militants’ killing of one of its pilots.

It also is likely to quiet concerns in Washington about the oil-rich Emirates’ commitment to the fight.

The seven-state federation stopped conducting airstrikes late last year after Jordanian Lt. Moaz al-Kassasbeh was captured when his plane crashed behind enemy lines, according to American officials. Kassasbeh was later burned alive in a cage by the militants.

American defense officials last week said they moved search-and-rescue aircraft closer to the battlefield, helping ease allies’ concerns about the coalition’s ability to aid downed pilots.

The General Command of the UAE Armed Forces said Emirati F-16s carried out a series of strikes Tuesday morning, according to a brief statement carried by the Gulf nation’s official WAM news agency.

It did not elaborate, nor did it say whether the strikes happened in Syria or Iraq. Previous Emirati airstrikes had been in Syria, making that the most likely site of its latest targets.

The Emirates had not commented on the suspension of its airstrikes in December, and Tuesday’s statement was the first confirmation it had restarted combat operations.

It has continued to provide logistical support to the campaign by hosting coalition warplanes at its air bases on the southern rim of the Persian Gulf. 

Abdulkhaleq Abdullah, a professor of political science at Emirates University, said the decision to resume flights from Jordan was meant to “send the right message to everybody that the UAE stands by its friends in times of need.”

He predicted the Emirati role in the coalition would be even stronger than before, now that it has American assurances about search-and-rescue capabilities. 

Meeting Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi in Cairo, his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin said that he expected the next round of Moscow talks to lead to a peaceful resolution of the conflict in Syria. 

The talks – expected to take place next month – follow a previous round, which ended Jan. 29, and were not seen as yielding a breakthrough as they were shunned by key political opposition in Syria and did not involve the main insurgent groups fighting on the ground.

“We look forward ... to the next round of such talks, which ultimately I hope will lead to a peaceful settlement of the situation in Syria,” Putin said.

Moscow has been a long-standing ally of Assad, whose government has called many of its opponents terrorists in the civil war, which has killed more than 200,000 people since 2011. 

On the ground, reports emerged Monday that ISIS has withdrawn some of its insurgents and equipment from areas northeast of the city of Aleppo, rebels and residents said, adding to signs of strain in the Syrian provinces it controls.

The group, which has recently lost ground to Kurdish and Syrian government forces elsewhere in the country, has pulled fighters and hardware from several villages in areas northeast of Aleppo, they said. But it has not fully withdrawn from the area.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said ISIS had redeployed forces from Aleppo province to join battles further east with Kurdish forces and mainstream rebel groups.