“Troops loyal to (Syrian President Bashar) al-Assad and their Russian allies started on Thursday a wide-scale attack on the villages of Handarat and the al-Mallahah Farms north of Aleppo”, said Mahmoud al-Shami, an activist based in the city.
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The election is going ahead independently of a U.N.-led peace process aimed at ending the five-year-long war.
The spike in violence, which has threatened to derail a shaky truce, has seen multiple fronts around Syria’s second city flare up as a new round of peace talks got under way in Geneva.
Rebel commanders from Syria said on Friday in Geneva they still backed the talks but accused the Damascus government of trying to shatter the ceasefire deal and urged world powers to judge whether it remained viable.
Putin also expressed hope that the truce will help the peace talks in Geneva and pave the way for a new constitution and an early election.
“We support its composition being half from the regime side and half from the revolution side”, Salem al-Muslet, chief spokesman for the High Negotiations Committee, said in an e-mailed statement on Thursday.
The delegation representing the Assad government is expected to arrive in Geneva on April 15 after vote-counting from parliamentary elections. The opposition says the vote is illegitimate and will obstruct already struggling diplomacy. He did not know the number held by opposition groups but said they were well treated. Assad said it was the first time a president had taken part in parliamentary polls. He said that neither the regime delegation nor the opposition delegation had rejected this document.
The UK-based watchdog group said the plane crashed, but the pilot survived and reached a government-controlled area in the countryside of Swaida. A United Nations body set up to monitor the delivery of humanitarian assistance to besieged and hard-to-reach areas in Syria accuses the government of Bashar al-Assad of continuing to hamper the delivery of desperately needed aid.
Ja’afari said de Mistura’s team would examine the government’s proposed changes to a list of fundamental principles for the talks before meeting again Monday.
“Such actions could well violate the cessation of hostilities, which has held for almost seven weeks but has been under increasing pressure in recent weeks”, the official said, reiterating a call for Russian Federation to “cease any provocative actions in Syria”.
In the minister’s words, the delegation of the Syrian government is taking to Geneva a reply to the unofficial document of 12 principles prepared by UN Special Envoy Staffan de Mistura. He said “terrorism managed to shed innocent blood and destroy much infrastructure, but it failed in achieving the primary goal it was assigned, which is destroying the principle structure in Syria, meaning the social structure of the national identity”, according to state media.
Russia’s foreign minister also defended the elections, saying their “role is to not leave a (power) vacuum”.
In Turkey, a local news agency said shells fired from Syria hit a southern Turkish area Wednesday, the fourth such cross-border incident in less than a week.
In the tightly-controlled Syrian capital, voters said they fully supported holding the elections.
The private Dogan news agency says the shells struck two areas of the city center of Kilis Wednesday morning, triggering panic.
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But the opposition says it contributes to an unfavorable climate for negotiations amid fierce fighting that threatens an increasingly tenuous cease-fire engineered by the United States and Russian Federation.
