“It’s far too early to draw any definitive conclusions,”said U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry defending the ceasefire”.
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Rami Abdurrahman, head of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, said there were minor violations in central Hama province.
One of Syria’s most powerful factions, Jabhat Fatah al-Sham’s battlefield alliance with other insurgent groups makes it hard for the United States to target them without the danger of inflicting harm to other opposition groups.
The Observatory meanwhile said more than 300,000 people have been killed since the conflict began in 2011.
“Trucks are waiting to cross the border and they have not crossed the border yet”, Marwa Awad, a spokesperson for the World Food Programme in Damascus told Middle East Eye.
Lavrov said Moscow “has nothing to hide” and wants the U.N. Security Council to formally approve the Syria truce deal as well.
The rebel-held part of Aleppo and two villages outside the city came under shelling on Tuesday from government forces, without causing any casualties, according to the United Kingdom -based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said on Tuesday that the dead include 59,000 government troops and more than 86,000 civilians.
Turkey has said it was already making preparations to deliver humanitarian aid to Aleppo, where some 250,000 people in the rebel-held east are under Assad regime siege.
The latest death toll figure from the United Nations, which stopped tracking casualties in 2015, had said that 250,000 have been killed in Syria.
A nervous calm has descended on Syria on the first full day of an agreed ceasefire as an American- and Russian-brokered deal largely appears to have taken hold across the country.
One monitoring group reported five violations occurred in and around Aleppo in the ceasefire’s first hours, while state-run news agency SANA said rebels were responsible for a number of breaches in Aleppo and Homs.
Humanitarian agencies are closely watching developments, poised to distribute much-needed aid to besieged areas, but say they are awaiting security guarantees to proceed with the delivery. “We hope this will be the beginning of the end of the civilians’ ordeal”, said Bassma Kodmani, a spokeswoman for the Syrian opposition coalition.
Israel said its aircraft attacked a Syrian army position after a stray mortar bomb struck the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights, a now-routine Israeli response to the occasional spillover from the war. If the ceasefire holds for that period, Russian Federation and the US would begin talks on military cooperation against terrorist groups in Syria. The Israeli military, however, denied the claim.
“We have agreed on the areas where such co-ordinated strikes would be taking place, and in those areas, on neutral agreement shared by the Syrian government as well, only the Russian and U.S. air force will be functional”, Lavrov said.
The Israeli military said “two surface-to-air missiles were launched from Syria after the mission overnight to target Syrian artillery positions” but that the safety of Israeli planes was not compromised.
Twenty aid trucks crossed from Turkey into the divided Syrian city of Aleppo Tuesday after a ceasefire went into effect, state media said, although the United Nations could not confirm the report.
The cease-fire in Syria appeared to be holding on Tuesday despite sporadic and minor violations, with observers saying most of the country was calm amid the latest attempt by the United States and Russian Federation to bring some quiet in the country’s devastating civil war, now in its sixth year.
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It’s not clear what happens if either, or both, Russian Federation and the US fail to cajole their allies into compliance, for the agreement lacks any explicit enforcement mechanism should either Assad or the rebels violate the term.
