It’s also an important way to judge if the ceasefire is successful.
Advertisement
“We’ve seen violations by both sides”.
The UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights on Wednesday said no fatalities have occurred in Homs, Latakia, Hama, the Damascus suburbs, Idlib and the rest of the Syrian areas included in the deal that began Monday.
The ceasefire deal, meant to bring humanitarian relief, calls for a halt to the violence between the Syrian regime and rebel forces.
“From the first minute Russia’s been meeting its obligations to enforce the cessation of hostilities in Syria”, the defense ministry said in the statement. Mr.al-Assad’s forces are no longer supposed to bomb Syria’s opposition.
US State Department spokesman Mark Toner Toner acknowledged Wednesday that the situation hadn’t been ideal.
If the cease-fire holds for seven days and humanitarian deliveries continue, the USA would begin discussions with Russian Federation on the establishment of a joint implementation cell.
“They agreed to discuss and agreed to extend the cessation for another 48 hours”, spokesman Mark Toner said, “with the goal being that this would last seven days and then we would move to the next step”.
The deal calls for the truce to be renewed every 48 hours, and for Washington and Moscow to begin unprecedented joint targeting of jihadists like ISIS and former Al-Qaeda affiliate Fateh al-Sham Front if the ceasefire lasts a week.
For instance, when a cease-fire was most recently put into place, Russian Federation and the Syrian regime used it to regroup and eventually target moderate rebels who opposed Assad, senior Pentagon officials recently told Foreign Policy.
“The Russians are authorized to be striking those targets”, says Lt. Col. Rick Francona, a CNN military analyst.
“We want to ensure all parties to the conflict are on the same page”, said David Swanson, spokesman for the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
But convoys still haven’t been able to get humanitarian aid to those in need – a driving factor for establishing the ceasefire in the first place.
The Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha has also slowed progress, an aid official in the region said. He said 20 United Nations trucks were waiting at the border “ready to go”.
“The government … needs to allow unhindered access to those trucks”, Mistura said Tuesday evening in Geneva.
Disagreements between the warring sides were blocking aid getting into opposition-held eastern Aleppo, Swanson added.
A key focus is eastern Aleppo, where around 250,000 civilians are besieged by government forces and waiting for aid stuck on the Turkish border over security concerns.
Activist groups monitoring the situation in Syria say there have been no civilian deaths recorded since the ceasefire came into effect on Monday.
Once that framework is established – it’s called the Joint Implementation Center, or JIC – the Syrian government will be barred from conducting air operations in areas where the JIC is active.
“We are still optimistic this will happen, but no one knows”, he said. “And if this agreement fails, the Syrian Air Force will know where to go to kill all of those rebels that we’ve been supporting”.
Military lawyers are determining what the legal liability is for the US if, after the collaboration begins, Russian Federation continues to use unguided, or “dumb”, bombs to indiscriminately hit civilian targets on the so-called “no-strike list” that include schools, hospitals and other critical Syrian infrastructure.
The agreement is also to allow for humanitarian aid to reach besieged areas, with the rebel-held part of the northern city of Aleppo as a priority.
In a speech on September 13, Human Rights Commissioner Zeid Ra’ad said Syria was one of five countries that routinely refused to cooperate with human rights investigators. “For five years the Assad regime – with Russian and Iranian help – has sought to survive politically through collective punishment and mass homicide”.
Advertisement
But the United Nations says its trucks, scheduled to deliver supplies to the devastated city of Aleppo, have been unable to enter Syria.
