Castello Road has special status under the U.S. -Russia agreement and the United States and Russian Federation are expected to manage a demilitarization of the route, allowing new checkpoints to ensure the flow of aid, de Mistura said.
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The reason for the hold-up appeared to be the continuing presence of some troops from both the Syrian government and the rebel side on the Castello road, a key thoroughfare leading from the besieged city of Aleppo to the border with Turkey, where a convoy of lorries loaded with vital supplies were waiting to cross over into Syria.
De Mistura said the Syrian government previously agreed to grant the authorization prior to the signing of the cease-fire deal, but no such facilitation letters have been received.
With the U.S. -Russian brokered cease-fire for the war-torn country holding for its third straight day, calls intensified to have the government permit aid access to besieged opposition areas.
“That is what makes a difference for the people, apart from seeing no more bombs or mortar shelling taking place”, said Mr de Mistura in Geneva.
“The bad news is that we are not using this window of opportunity so far to reach all of these places with humanitarian assistance, like we did when this humanitarian task force was born out of the February agreement on the cessation of hostilities”, he said. “It is particularly regrettable …” “These are days which we should have used for convoys to move with the permit to go because there is no fighting”, he stressed.
Russian Federation and a war monitor said the Syrian army had begun to withdraw from a road into Aleppo on Thursday, a prerequisite for pressing ahead with global peacemaking efforts as the government and rebels accused each other of violating a truce.
State department spokesman Mark Toner said on Wednesday that “we’ve seen violations on both sides” in Syria, although the ceasefire is broadly holding.
CNN Senior International Correspondent Frederik Pleitgen reached the government-controlled part of Aleppo on Thursday and said the area was as calm as he’d ever seen it. “The reason we’re not in eastern Aleppo has again been a combination of very hard and detailed discussions around security monitoring and passage of roadblocks, which is both opposition and government”, he said. “There is no withdrawal by the regime from the Castello Road”, said Zakaria Malahifji, of the Aleppo-based rebel group Fastaqim.
Toner said that the US administration is doing its best to answer questions from partners and the media with respect to the deal.
The “bad news”, he said, was a lack of a green light for United Nations trucks to cross front lines.
Jan Egeland, a special advisor to the UN Syria envoy, added they were making a “simple” appeal to all parties.
“No aid has arrived in Aleppo”. Assad’s Foreign Ministry has also informed that Syrian will not allow any humanitarian aid, especially provided by Ankara, to enter Aleppo without coordination with the Assad regime. The report said two people guarding the location were wounded.
Egeland says people in Madaya, near Syria’s border with Lebanon, are starving.
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According to US officials, if Russian Federation and the regime fulfill their obligations under the arrangement, Washington and Moscow will hold bilateral talks on potential military cooperation against Daesh and also Nusrah Front, which recently detached itself with al-Qaeda and rebranded itself as Jabhat Fateh al-Sham. It wasn’t known who carried out the airstrike. Earlier, the Russian General Staff also called for extending the truce, although it reported a significant number of violations by various militant groups.
