The impasse threatens to bring down the shaky ceasefire. Castello Road, nicknamed “Death Road” is said to be the only way into rebel-held neighborhoods in eastern Aleppo.
Advertisement
Putin also suggested the US was taking a “very unsafe route” trying to maintain the combat potential of rebels fighting the Syrian government and expressed that the USA could not separate moderate rebels from “the half-criminal and terrorist elements”.
Rami Abdurrahman of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights – a monitoring group based in the United Kingdom – said Syrian government forces that were stationed on the Castello Road have been replaced by Russian troops, the Associated Press reported. “This is what is supposed to happen, but there is nothing to give hope”, said Zakaria Malahifji, of the Aleppo-based rebel group Fastaqim.
Russian Federation said Thursday that Syrian armed forces were “fulfilling their obligations and have started a gradual withdrawal” from the route, but rebel groups did not appear to be carrying out a simultaneous pullback as agreed.
Syrian state television described the incident as a violation of the ceasefire.
The United Nations faces “a problem” in shipping humanitarian aid into Syria, the U.N. envoy for the war-torn country said Thursday, pinning the blame on the lack of authorization from Bashar Assad’s government that has even disappointed Russian Federation, the Syrian president’s key backer.
Syrians unload boxes after a 48-truck aid convoy entered the rebel-held town of Talbiseh, a besieged area in northern rural Homs, in July.
“In order to actually initiate the actual movement of these convoys (to besieged areas) we need the facilitation letters”.
But on Friday morning, the trucks were still waiting at the border with Turkey, said David Swanson, a spokesman for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. “And certainly we would look to the Russians, given their leverage over the regime and their communications with the regime to, as quickly as possible, remove those impediments and allow that humanitarian assistance to flow”.
“There seems to be little pullback by both sides [Syrian government and rebels] on that road to allow this aid in”, Al Jazeera’s Charles Stratford, reporting from Gazientep on the Turkish border with Syria, said.
The Russian Ministry of Defense said ISIS militants launched an attack on the Syrian position after the airstrikes, Sputnik reported.
East Aleppo, where around 250,000 civilians are besieged by government forces, is a major concern for humanitarian organizations.
De Mistura says Thursday the Syrian government has not provided needed “facilitation letters” to allow for the start of United Nations -led aid convoys expected under the new cease-fire agreement.
Nevertheless, the ceasefire appears to have led to a respite in violence in the five-year civil war that’s killed 430,000 people, according to one estimate, and touched off an global refugee crisis.
A tense cease-fire brokered by Moscow and Washington went into effect on Monday. It also said three shells were fired at the government-held southern village of Hadar.
Violent clashes and shells hit areas east of the Syrian capital Damascus on Friday.
Almost two dozen rockets and grenades were fired near Jobar neighbourhood on the eastern outskirts of Damascus, the observatory said, adding that two shells fell in the Old City, controlled by the government. “It was worked out as a bilateral U.S. -Russia arrangement”, spokesman Mark Toner stated.
In New York, the UN Security Council cancelled an urgent meeting that had been called to discuss whether to endorse the truce, billed as the “last chance” to end the 5-year war that has killed 300,000 people.
Advertisement
Russian ambassador to the U.N. Vitaly Churkin said there was no point in briefing the council if the USA did not want to say exactly what was in the deal.
