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.
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Staffan de Mistura said a U.S. -Russia-brokered cease-fire deal agreed on last week has largely reduced the violence since it came into effect on Monday, but the humanitarian aid flow that was expected to follow has not materialized.
If a green light was given, a spokesman for the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said the first 20 trucks would move to Aleppo and if they reached the city safely, the second convoy would then also leave.
Speaking to Reuters, he lamented a lack of mechanisms to enforce the ceasefire and accused the Assad government and its allies of committing minor violations “to impede the other goals of the truce, such as delivering necessary aid to besieged areas”.
“It’s particularly regrettable because we are losing time”, de Mistura said. “These are days which should be used in order to transfer aid since there is no fighting taking place”.
The Syria cease-fire deal struck by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov is created to pause the civil war so that the superpowers’ militaries can be jointly concentrated against the Islamic extremist groups operating within the chaos on the ground.
Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad has refused to allow humanitarian convoys into the city of Aleppo, breaking a central condition of the newly brokered ceasefire between the USA and Russian Federation.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the fighting between government troops and rebels is concentrated in the neighborhood of Jobar, next to Qaboun where rebels have had a presence for years.
The Russian Defence Ministry said earlier that coalition warplanes had killed 62 Syrian servicemen and injured 100 others, TASS reported. It also said three shells were fired at the government-held southern village of Hadar.
Russian ambassador Vitaly Churkin said 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.
The full text of the deal has not yet been released, but from what we do know, it freezes in place the territory now held by both the government and the rebels.
At least 23 people, including nine children, were killed during airstrikes in Syria on Thursday, as the United States and Russian Federation accused each other of violating a fragile ceasefire.
“This is something that is required to happen immediately”, de Mistura told reporters in Geneva.
That casualty toll is according to Deir el-Zour 24, an activist collective.
Insurgents shelled government-held areas in the eastern Damascus neighborhood of Qaboun, wounding three people, Syrian state media said.
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It wasn’t known who carried out the airstrike. An official in an Aleppo-based Syrian rebel group said global parties had told him aid was now due to be delivered on Friday. It includes a nationwide truce that started at sundown on Monday, improved humanitarian aid access and joint military targeting of banned Islamist groups. They said, however, that they will need to take assets from other parts of the world, because US military leaders don’t want to erode the current USA -led coalition campaign against the Islamic State group in Iraq and Syria. Al-Qaida and Islamic State group militants, who are excluded from the cease-fire, are not present in the area, he said.
