Russia, a key backer of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, accused the United States Thursday of failing to meet its obligations under the truce deal.
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De Mistura said 40 aid trucks are ready to move and that the United Nations would prioritize delivery to the embattled, rebel-held eastern neighbourhoods of the northern city of Aleppo.
The UN Syria envoy urges the Damascus government to allow humanitarian aid deliveries indicating the regime has broken its pledges on the distribution of life-saving supplies.
Russian Federation on Thursday said government forces had begun to pull out from the area and accused rebel fighters of failing to withdraw as agreed.
“It’s particularly regrettable because we are losing time”, de Mistura said.
US Secretary of State John Kerry had earlier called his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov and condemned “repeated and unacceptable delays of humanitarian aid”, State Department spokesman John Kirby said.
The truce has been holding despite some violations, with the Syrian opposition on Thursday reporting 46 cease-fire violations around the country.
The Observatory said government forces and opposition fighters were ready to withdraw from the Castello road, a main artery into Aleppo, to hand it over to Russian troops.
The ceasefire deal calls for the demilitarization of the key Castello Road into the city, and Russian Federation said on Thursday afternoon that Syrian armed forces were “fulfilling their obligations and have started a gradual withdrawal” from the route.
He said the Syrian army has fully complied with the truce that went into force Monday, while the opposition units have violated it 144 times since then. The UN has said it can not cross front lines or checkpoints without Syrian permission.
Hours-long fighting and shelling erupted in neighborhoods on the edges of Damascus on Friday, with activists and residents calling the clashes the heaviest in the Syrian capital in weeks.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, meanwhile, says Thursday’s airstrike killed seven people.
“What we had hoped was that the Russians and the Americans by now would have told the [Syrian] government and armed [Syrian] opposition groups that this is the way that it should be and that we would have had the access that we needed by now”, Egeland said.
Konashenkov blamed the USA for “its failure to honor its part of the commitments, especially on disengaging the moderate opposition”. The regime reportedly dropped barrel bombs on rebel-held areas of Aleppo just minutes after the ceasefire began. “But it is not reasonable to ask our partners to support something they do not know”, Bogdanov said in an interview.
Also not included in the truce is the al-Qaida affiliate in Syria, the Fatah al-Sham Front which was formerly known as the Nusra Front.
“As I speak, that has not been the case”, Jens Laerke, spokesman for the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, told Reuters.
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The reduction in violence since the US-Russia agreement came into force at sunset on Monday had been substantial, but expecting a “cessation of hostilities” was perhaps ambitious after a war of five years, he said.
