A nationwide ceasefire brokered by the United States and Russian Federation was mostly holding across Syria on Tuesday and efforts to deliver badly needed aid to besieged areas including the northern city of Aleppo got cautiously underway.
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What the Syrian regime thinks of the ceasefire: The Syrian army announced that it would abide by it until midnight on September 18, while maintaining its right to defend itself against any violations.
More than 280,000 people have been killed and millions displaced since the start of the Syrian conflict in 2011. “We are now just trying to survive the day”.
Twenty-four hours after the truce took effect, senior State Department officials said there had been a reduction in violence.
The truce does not cover the jihadist groups Islamic State or Jabhat Fateh al-Sham, a group formerly called the Nusra Front which was al Qaeda’s Syria branch until it changed its name in July.
If the lull in violence continues for seven consecutive days and if humanitarian access is sustained during that span, the USA and Russian Federation “would begin coordinating with Russian Federation on airstrikes specifically targeting Nusra in a strategic, very calculated way”, Toner said.
The cease-fire deal was reached last week but opened under a cloud of doubt after at least one rebel group did not commit to the plan, and Syrian President Bashar Assad vowed to “retake every area from the terrorists”.
“That should put an end to the barrel bombs, an end to the indiscriminate bombing of civilian neighborhoods”, Kerry said.
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 on Tuesday morning but that many people were still hunkering down in their homes, fearful of going out.
There were conflicting reports Tuesday on whether an aid convoy of 20 trucks had crossed into northern Syria from Turkey.
The Castello Road to the north of Aleppo is a key flashpoint that runs to the rebel-held part of the city but has been controlled by Syrian regime forces.
Dehqan further stated all countries must respect the legal and legitimate Syrian government because the crisis in the war-stricken country can not be settled through military approaches. If the ceasefire holds for that period, Russian Federation and the USA would begin talks on military cooperation against terrorist groups in Syria.
But that group has been playing a key role alongside other rebels in areas like Aleppo, so separating its fighters from those who are protected by the ceasefire may prove to be the most hard task of the coming days.
Both the Syrian government and opposition groups reported sporadic incidents in the first few hours after the ceasefire went into effect at sundown (11.45 a.m. ET) Monday.
On Friday, the U.S. and Russian Federation sealed an ambitious agreement on Syria that also envisages unprecedented military coordination against militant groups there.
It said on Tuesday that the dead include 59,000 government troops and more than 86,000 civilians.
Meanwhile, the Syrian Armed Forces reported that an Israeli fighter-bomber and a drone were shot down in this region, a statement quickly denied by the Israel, which argues that only rockets were launched from there.
Turkey’s military said earlier in the day that it shelled two targets inside Syria after a mortar round fell inside Turkey, minutes after a cease-fire came into effect. Its effectiveness as a fighting unit in Idlib and in (temporarily) breaking the government’s siege of eastern Aleppo has brought many rebel factions into its orbit.
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The agreement, announced Friday after marathon talks between Russian Federation and the United States, has been billed as the best chance yet to halt Syria’s five-year war, which has left 290,000 people dead.
