Humanitarian aid is a key part of the deal yet the Syrian government said that it will only allow aid convoys to enter the country with prior coordination with Damascus and the UN.
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“We can not let days of this reduction of violence to be wasted by not moving forward”, on humanitarian aid, he added. But they have also criticised its exclusion from the ceasefire agreement.
The agreement envisions Castello Road as “a demilitarized zone, where there could be greater traffic, greater humanitarian traffic, unimpeded and unthreatened”, the USA official said.
Russian Ambassador Vitaly Churkin said on Thursday that he hopes the Security Council will adopt a resolution endorsing the agreement at next week’s high-level General Assembly meeting, which draws leaders from around the globe.
Who’s fighting who, and why?
The agreement that Secretary of State John Kerry announced with Russia to reduce the killing in Syria has widened an increasingly public divide between Kerry and Defense Secretary Ash Carter, who has deep reservations about the plan for USA and Russian forces to jointly target terror groups.
The cessation of hostilities, brokered by US Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov on Friday, went into effect on Monday night.
“Unless it is part of a humiliating deal”, he said.
Russia, meanwhile, also accused its USA counterparts of not meeting their obligations under the truce. He added that rebels had violated the ceasefire 60 times since it came into force on Monday (Tuesday in Manila).
It aims to halt fighting between President Bashar Assad’s forces and rebel factions, but does not include jihadists like the Islamic State (IS). Turkish ground forces joined Syrian rebels to expel Islamic State militants from the town last month.
One of Syria’s most powerful factions, Jabhat Fatah al-Sham’s battlefield alliance with other insurgent groups makes it hard for the United States to target them without the danger of inflicting harm on other opposition groups.
The deal calls for the demilitarization of the Castello Road route into the city, and Russian Federation said Syrian troops were set to begin withdrawing by 0600 GMT on Thursday.
Russian Federation on Tuesday said it was abiding the truce along with the Syrian government, but claimed that the USA government had failed to reign in its affiliates within the Syrian rebels.
“Those facilitation letters, i.e. final permission for the U.N.to actually reach those areas (needing aid), have not been received”, he said, adding that they were required immediately. While the statement did not explicitly back the ceasefire, rebel sources cited by Reuters news agency said the groups were abiding by it.
It was also quiet in the largely rebel-held northwestern province of Idlib, where air strikes killed 13 people only hours before the truce.
The truce, brokered last week by Russian Federation and USA, set out an initial two-day ceasefire to be followed by extensions.
How ceasefires have failed before: This is the second attempt this year to try reduce violence in war-torn Syria.
“I don’t just want the renewal of the truce to be about stopping the bombing”.
A Syrian woman prays over the grave of her son at a cemetery in the rebel-held town of Douma on September 12, 2016.
At the start of the civil war in Syria in 2011, Khalil Koto headed a branch of the country’s Energy Ministry in his hometown Afrin in northwestern Syria.
Syrian Observatory for Human Rights Director Rami Abdulrahman said each side wanted the withdrawal from the Castello Road to happen simultaneously.
Many refugees have died attempting unsafe crossings in rickety boats over the Mediterranean to reach Europe, where many countries have tightened their rules on asylum-seekers to prevent more Syrians and others from coming in.
“Our appeal is the following – it’s a simple one”, Mr Egeland said.
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This is a state led by a medical doctor and yet is believed to have gassed its own people; has attacked hospitals and bombed civilian neighborhoods with indiscriminate explosive weapons; and maintains tens of thousands of detainees in inhuman conditions.
