The United States has “made clear” to Russian Federation that it won’t start joint military operations in Syria until humanitarian aid reaches besieged areas of the war-torn country, the State Department said Friday. The state news agency, SANA, said militants attempted to infiltrate the capital and launch raids on military checkpoints.
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Earlier Friday, a barrage of rocket fire and shelling could be heard coming from the rebel-held east Damascus district of Jobar, an AFP correspondent said. He vowed again this week to win back the entire country, which has been splintered into areas controlled by the state, a constellation of rebel factions, Islamic State jihadists, and Kurdish militia fighters.
The truce has been holding despite some violations in different areas, with the Syrian opposition on Thursday reporting 46 cease-fire violations around the country.
The Observatory reported the first three deaths since the it went into effect.
Russian Federation said Syrian government troops had begun to withdraw from Castello Road on the outskirts of Aleppo – the route through which the trucks will pass – on Thursday but this has not been independently confirmed.
Activists in Syria’s besieged Aleppo protest against the United Nations for what they say is its failure to lift the siege off their rebel-held area, Tuesday, Sept. 13, 2016. The drivers piloting the aid trucks will have to navigate through a war zone on roads that are in very poor condition. A United Nations spokesman said the first convoy of trucks was carrying flour for more than 150,000 people, while the second was carrying food rations for 35,000 people for a month.
Aid deliveries are part of a U.S. -Russia deal that imposed a cease-fire, which started Monday.
“Despite the agreement, opposition ranks have not withdrawn their hardware and weapons from the Castello Road”, Savchenko said.
“Coalition forces believed they were striking a Daesh fighting position”, said a Pentagon statement, referring to the extremist group in its Arabic acronym.
Russia’s deployment on the road would mark the most overt participation of its ground forces in the Syrian war and underlines the country’s role as a major power broker. Russian Federation intervened with its air force on the side of President Bashar al-Assad’s government a year ago, turning the tide of the war in his favor.
The Russian Defense Ministry said 62 Syrians were killed in the strike, and the Syrian government said the coalition airstrike allowed the Islamic State to advance around Deir el-Zour province where the attack took place.
“There are violations, but it has been made very clear by the U.S. and Russian Federation that this was expected”, said Al Jazeera’s Stefanie Dekker, reporting from Kilis on the Turkish side of the border with Syria.
The US is not known to have directly struck Syrian president Bashar Assad’s forces at any point during the five-year civil war.
Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov said in an interview with the RIA Novosti news that Assad’s future is “purely Syrian business”.
Russian Federation has given fresh assurances it has impressed on the Syrian government it must allow aid into rebel-held east Aleppo and elsewhere in Syria, but said it needed reassurances that the United States was putting pressure on Syrian opposition groups to abide by their side of the bargain.
But early Friday, the trucks were still waiting at the border with Turkey, said David Swanson, a spokesman for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
“Right now, the trucks that could bring them life-saving assistance are idling on the wrong side of the border”, President Barack Obama’s spokesman Josh Earnest said.
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The Foreign Ministry says Saturday that the government has done all that is necessary to facilitate the delivery of humanitarian aid, a key component of a U.S.
