The UN’s Syria envoy Staffan de Mistura said the truce was holding “by and large”.
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The UN envoy said humanitarian relief deliveries would be focused on besieged neighborhoods in rebel-controlled parts of Aleppo, the city in northern Syria that has seen increased fighting over the past few weeks.
He said the regime is expected to provide letters of facilitation which would allow aid convoys to reach east Aleppo, where around 250,000 civilians are besieged by regime forces.
Aside from the reducing the bloodshed, the “second dividend” of the U.S. -Russia deal is humanitarian access, de Mistura told reporters in Geneva.
“We can get the permits today actually, or they could come tomorrow morning”, he said, adding “we hope to go tomorrow to eastern Aleppo (and) we are ready to go before the end of the week to the other places”. That’s a fact. It is particularly regrettable because normally during these days we are losing time. “These are days which we should have used for convoys to move with the permits to go because there is no fighting”.
The truce has been holding despite some violations, with the Syrian opposition on Thursday reporting 46 cease-fire violations around the country.
An organisation that monitors the war also said the Syrian army had begun moving away, but insurgent groups in Aleppo said they had not seen the army withdrawing from the Castello Road, needed to allow aid deliveries into the city, and would not pull back from their own positions near the road until they did.
But once the joint Russian-US targeting begins, government warplanes “will no longer be able to fly in any areas of Syria where there is opposition or Al-Nusra Front presence”, a senior US administration official said Tuesday.
Mr de Mistura’s humanitarian adviser Jan Egeland said there had been no reports of civilian killings in the past 24 hours and attacks on schools and hospitals had stopped.
“Our appeal is the following”, Egeland said.
“Can well-fed, grown men please stop putting political bureaucratic and procedural road blocks for courageous humanitarian workers that are willing and able to go to serve women, children, wounded civilians in besieged and cross-fire areas?”
Castello Road has special status under the U.S. -Russia agreement and the United States and Russian Federation are expected to manage a demilitarisation of the route, allowing new checkpoints to ensure the flow of aid, de Mistura said.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said it was unclear whose warplanes attacked Al-Mayadin.
No access to Castello Road means no aid to areas badly hit in Aleppo.
Jens Laerke, a spokesman for the United Nations humanitarian office, said the aid convoys were awaiting assurances of safety in Syria’s volatile northwest. -Russian committee to investigate reported cease-fire violations and “make its findings available to the Syrian public”. The third casualty, according to the Observatory, was a civilian who also died by sniper fire in the rebel-held part of Aleppo.
The opposition reported 29 violations by government forces, including shelling, air raids and heavy machine gunfire.
Syrian opposition activists say an airstrike on the eastern Syrian town of Mayadeen, which is held by the Islamic State group, has killed at least four people and wounded dozens.
The ceasefire, orchestrated by US Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov took effect on 12 September.
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The text of the cease-fire agreement has not been released and Russian Federation said it was being kept private at the request of the United States. The U.S. has said the rebels will soon need to separate themselves from the extremists.
