The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the city was calm early Thursday but that government warplanes later bombarded several rebel-held neighborhoods in Aleppo.
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That deadline passed without authorization from Damascus for worldwide aid organizations to enter many rebel-held besieged areas prompting the U.S., the UK and France to call on the United Nations to begin airdropping aid into the country. Between 200,000 and 300,000 people are still thought to live in rebel-held areas.
“Conditions in Al-Waer. are awful”. He said a large convoy is ready to go to the besieged Homs suburb of al Waer, where people have recently died for lack of humanitarian aid, and convoys are expected to reach 50,000 people in Afrin in northern Aleppo and 25,000 in the Damascus suburb of Kafr Batna later on Thursday.
Last week, aid finally reached the besieged town of Daraya for the first time since 2012 and Douma for the first time since 2014.
The U.N. estimates that some 500,000 Syrians are trapped across 18 besieged areas in the country, majority encircled by regime forces, while the monitoring group Siege Watch puts the tally at 1 million.
Special advisor to the UN Special Envoy for Syria, Jan Egeland, welcomed the ceasefire with hopes that the truce will mean more access for the delivery of humanitarian aid.
“We can not continue this stop-go”.
Documenting the delivery of aid since the start of the conflict, they accuse the United Nations of allowing the Syrian regime to dictate the delivery of aid in a country in a state of civil war.
“This temporary truce of a few hours doesn’t aim to end the bloodshed, but to give some rest to the killers – those who massacre the people of Aleppo and Syria – before they resume their crimes”, the Observatory said in a statement. “I really hope that this was a turning point for our access to besieged areas and also to hard-to-reach areas, but we shouldn’t be naive, the war is continuing and in a war zone everything is fragile”.
T he Russian defence ministry has introduced a 48 hour “regime of silence” in Aleppo beginning midnight on Wednesday, with the aim of “lowering the level of armed violence and stabilising the situation”, while also calling for a long-term ceasefire in the city.
It had a pre-war population of more than two million.
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Peace talks aimed at ending the five-year conflict have stalled and the February 27 countrywide ceasefire between the regime and non-jihadist rebels lies in tatters.
