In exchange for these sweeping concessions, which essentially abandon Obama’s onetime goal of freeing Syria from Assad and make the United States a junior partner of Russian Federation in the Middle East’s most important ongoing conflict, Kerry promises that humanitarian lifelines will be opened into the besieged city of Aleppo and other areas subjected to surrender-or-starve tactics.
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Russian airpower had been actively targeting opposition forces – including those trained and equipped by American military advisers – fighting to overthrow embattled Syrian President Bashar Assad.
Outside the scope of the truce, Turkey said air strikes by a US-led coalition had killed three fighters from ISIS.
It allows Syrian government strikes against al-Qaida-linked militants who fight alongside the rebels.
Emergency aid deliveries to Syria are expected to start on September 14 as a cease-fire appears to be largely holding. “Sources on the ground, which do matter, including inside Aleppo city, said the situation has dramatically improved with no air strikes”, he said in Geneva.
U.N. Special Envoy for Syria Staffan de Mistura declared that U.N. aid access should be possible soon, including to eastern Aleppo, the rebel-held half of the city that is under blockade.
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.
The Syrian government has said it would reject any aid deliveries to Aleppo not coordinated through Damascus and the United Nations, particularly from Turkey.
But the reports of violence were far less intense than normal.
But such violations are not uncommon in the early hours of a ceasefire.
Only a trickle of aid from Turkey made its way into northern Syria Tuesday, where civilians who’ve been through hell are waiting, desperate for food and medicine.
“It’s a last chance to be able to hold Syria together”, Kerry said in an interview with NPR’s Morning Edition. “As I speak, that has not been the case”, Jens Laerke, spokesman for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, said in Geneva.
In the northern city of Aleppo, which has seen heavy fighting in recent months, opposition activists said rebel-held parts of the city were calm, although many people were still hunkering down in their homes, fearful of going out.
The head of the city council for opposition-held Aleppo expressed concern that planned deliveries would be conducted according to Russian wishes and would not meet the needs of an estimated 300,000 people living there. About 11 million people have been made homeless in the world’s worst refugee crisis. The Syrian army said it would abide by the cease-fire until midnight Sunday, while maintaining its right to defend itself against any violations. It denied a Syrian claim that a warplane and drone were shot down.
If it does happen, however, US officials said the cooperation would be a sharply limited and carefully controlled exchange of very basic targeting information that would protect USA intelligence gathering and tactics, and involve detailed vetting to ensure that any proposed Russian strikes would hit Islamic State or al-Qaida-linked combatants, not the rebels fighting Syrian President Bashar Assad.
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“One thing we can say with confidence”, a senior USA official said during a background briefing late Tuesday afternoon, “is there has been a significant drop in the level of violence – not to zero, obviously, and we would like to see even a greater drop in the days to come”.
