However, France on Thursday called on the United States to share details of the deal.
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The UN said it has not received the necessary guarantees from the usa and Russian Federation for aid convoys to cross the Turkish border into Syria – nor permission from the Syrian government for trucks to get through government checkpoints to deliver badly need supplies.
Both sides accuse each other of failing to withdraw from Aleppo’s Castello Road, the main route into the rebel-held area, which would be used to bring aid.
The cease-fire that went into effect Monday is part of a U.S. -Russia agreement that also calls for allowing humanitarian aid to reach besieged areas in Aleppo. The U.S. has rarely bombed the group, previously known as the Nusra Front, and the targeting is trickier because the militants are often intermingled with other U.S. -backed Syrian rebels.
In Washington, a US official said the session was canceled because the Russians were trying to force the U.S.to make the cease-fire deal public. According to Sky News, Russia has long believed that some of the “moderate rebels” that the United States supports are in fact terrorist organizations with ties to the Islamic State and al-Qaeda. “But who is particularly disappointed are the Syrian people”.
Under the ceasefire, the U.S. and Russian Federation said they would set up a “Joint Implementation Centre” to share targeting information for airstrikes in Syria if the truce that took effect on Monday holds for one week. “There is nothing new in Aleppo”, Zakaria Malahifji, of the Aleppo-based rebel group Fastaqim, told Reuters by phone.
On Thursday the US State Department spokesman Mark Toner said the brokered cessation of hostilities is holding by and large, although it is not ideal. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on a conference call: “In general, we can still state that the process is moving forward, despite some setbacks”. He says that Moscow hopes that “our American counterparts will do the same”.
It aims to halt fighting between Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s forces and rebels, but excludes jihadists like IS.
State Department spokesman John Kirby said what was agreed last week in Geneva, including a Joint Implementation Centre, “won’t happen” unless Russian Federation exercises its influence over Syria. He said Tuesday evening that the truckloads of aid would remain in Turkey until the U.N.is able to negotiate their safe passage.
Two convoys of 20 trucks filled with vital supplies are being held in a “special customs zone” on the Turkish border.
He clarifies that the United Nations does not require authorization from Syria’s government for cross-border aid deliveries.
Jan Egeland, the top humanitarian aid official in de Mistura’s office, said the United Nations could reach its target areas in the country within a “few days” once it received authorization.
Opposition activists and state media are reporting clashes between troops and insurgents as well as shelling in two neighborhoods of the Syrian capital, Damascus.
The United States said it wanted to see definitive progress before the next stages of the ceasefire take effect.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which is based in Britain, said the fighting was actually in Jobar, to the south of Qaboun.
Russian Federation wants the U.N. Security Council to endorse the Syrian cease-fire agreement that it brokered together with the United States.
The U.S. mission to the United Nations said it could not agree with Russian Federation on a way to brief the council that would “not compromise the operational security of the arrangement”.
The cease-fire is meant to help set the state for peace talks to end Syria’s civil war, now in its sixth year.
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Despite the cease-fire, however, the SNHR said, aid deliveries have been prevented from reaching the eastern part of Aleppo in line with an agreement reached in February.
