Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad vowed to retake all of Syria from insurgents, hours before a truce brokered by Russian Federation and the United States was due to take hold yesterday.
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Jabhat Fatah al-Sham, formerly known as the Nusra Front, also praised in a statement on Tuesday other insurgent factions in Syria, which have criticized the deal for excluding the al-Qaida affiliate.
Syrian opposition activists and monitoring groups say the cease-fire in Syria appears to be holding since coming into effect the previous night, despite sporadic and minor violations.
Kerry made these remarks despite some continued violence in Aleppo and provocative comments made by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
Meanwhile, the Free Syrian Army legal adviser Osama Abu Zeid said opposition factions were concerned regarding the difficulty to separate areas controlled by Jubhat Fatah al-Sham from those controlled by opposition factions.
In June, activists said the regime pounded the area with barrel bombs hours after food was delivered there for the first time in almost four years.
Miliband suggested that one of the potential major sticking points is that the USA and Russian Federation will need to set up a joint military command in order to target Daesh, an issue that may be complicated by the lack of trust between the two militaries and the different interests each has in the broader war.
Opposition groups have demanded Assad’s departure as a condition to lasting peace, which has so far been a non-starter for government negotiations.
“I’ve been in public life for more than four decades now, and I have never seen a more complicated or entangled political and military, sectarian, somewhat religiously-overtoned issue than what exists in Syria today”.
The Syrian National Coalition says that any effort that aims to end the suffering of the people “is a step in the right direction and we will deal with it positively”.
But in Aleppo, the northern city that has emerged as the epicenter of the fighting, opposition media activist Mahmoud Raslan said government helicopters dropped crude barrel bombs on a contested neighborhood.
The ceasefire deal, hammered out between USA secretary of state John Kerry and Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov in Geneva on Saturday, was backed by Mr Assad’s government.
Until last month, Darayya was rebel-held territory, but after a crushing siege, the rebels were forced to surrender to Assad’s forces.
Despite pessimism over how long the cease-fire would last, calm was widely reported after it took effect at 7 p.m. local time, but there were a few notable exceptions.
Hours before the cease-fire went into effect, Assad vowed that his government would take back land from “terrorists” and rebuild the country.
The deal, announced last week by Washington and Moscow, calls for a halt to fighting between the USA -backed opposition and the Russian-allied Syrian government.
On Monday, the Syrian regime announced the start of the U.S. -Russia-brokered cease-fire across the war-torn country.
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Under the terms, if violence is significantly reduced for seven days, the United States and Russian Federation will collaborate on new airstrikes against jihadi militants in Syria, and the Syrian air force will be barred from flying over insurgent-held areas.
