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.
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Syria’s military began withdrawing from a major artery to Aleppo late Thursday as the United Nations envoy accused President Bashar Assad’s government of obstructing aid access to the contested city.
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. The rebels said Syrian army jets had struck in Hama and Idlib, and used artillery near Damascus. An official in an Aleppo-based Syrian rebel group said worldwide parties had told him aid was now due to be delivered on Friday.
Too many forces, from Bashar Assad’s government to al-Qaida’s Syrian offshoot, don’t really want the cease-fire to last. It has been a major frontline in the war.
The ceasefire was extended for further 48 hours after a call between US Secretary of State John Kerry and his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov on Wednesday.
The group says the children were killed in government-held areas and the civilian died in rebel-held Aleppo.
“There is great fear because the regime exploits every opportunity”, Zakaria Malahifji of the Aleppo-based rebel group Fastaqim told Reuters news agency.
At a news conference in Geneva Thursday, UN Special Envoy for Syria Staffan De Mistura and his special adviser, Jan Egeland, said they believed they could obtain permits to deliver the aid.
“Saying that we’re going to get everyone to the negotiating table isn’t really a strategy”, Ford said.
The State Department said it was not ready to publish the pact but would discuss it in detail with partners on the sidelines of next week’s U.N. General Assembly meetings in NY.
The trucks carrying aid are ready to enter the city of Aleppo as planned according to the ceasefire agreement, but according to human rights organizations, there are still many armed persons blocking the roads to the besieged city, contrary to the Syrian regime’s commitment to clear the area.
The International Syria Support Group includes Turkey, Saudi Arabia, China, Germany, France, Iran, as well as several European and Arab countries, and the Arab League and European Union.
The Russian Defense Ministry on Wednesday came out for prolonging the cessation of hostilities regime in the whole territory of Syria for another 48 hours.
How ceasefires have failed before: This is the second attempt this year to try reduce violence in war-torn Syria.
Since 2011, the civil war has killed hundreds of thousands in Syria and displaced half the country’s population of 11 million.
Under the terms of the deal, if peace holds for seven days, Russian Federation and the United States will begin coordinated military strikes against targeted terror groups in the conflict.
Washington hopes the pact will pave the way to a resumption of political talks.
A convoy of 20 aid trucks stocked with a month’s worth of food supplies for 40,000 people is waiting on the Turkish border, but Ban said the necessary security guarantees had not been given.
“There’s an impression that the goal of Washington’s “curtain of words” is an intention to hide the fact that it is not fulfilling its obligations, above all the separation of units of the “moderate opposition” from the terrorists”, Konashenkov said.
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As part of the truce agreement, both sides are expected to pull back and create a demilitarised zone around the Castello Road, considered the only route into the rebel-held east of Aleppo.
