US and Russian Federation agreed that the Syrian cessation of hostilities that began on Monday had largely held and should be extended for another 48 hours despite sporadic violence, the US State Department said on Wednesday.
Advertisement
Secretary of State John Kerry spoke to Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov on yesterday and they agreed that “as a whole, despite sporadic reports of violence, the arrangement is holding and violence is significantly lower”, State Department spokesman Mark Toner told reporters.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said regime forces and opposition fighters are now ready to withdraw from the Castello road, a main artery into Aleppo, to hand it over to Russian troops.
The five-year long civil war in Syria has left hundreds of thousands of people dead and more than 11 million people have been displaced. The “Islamic State” (IS, ISIL, ISIS or Daesh), the YPG and the PYD are the most active terrorist groups in Syria.
Food aid for desperate civilians in eastern Aleppo remained stuck on the Syrian border on Friday, the fourth morning of a fragile internationally-brokered truce in the war-ravaged country.
A representative of a group in the Free Syrian Army – a loose coalition of rebel forces claiming to be on the more moderate end of the spectrum – said his group and others fighting around Aleppo rejected the USA plan.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a UK-based activist group, however said it had not recorded a single civilian or combatant death from fighting since Monday.
Moscow said Wednesday that mortar fire on the route could delay the pullback.
ABC reported that UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called on the USA and Russian Federation to do more to guarantee humanitarian aid to besieged areas.
The convoy of aid was supposed to head towards Aleppo on Wednesday, but Ban said the security arrangements were still not in place.
The UN had hoped that forty trucks of food – enough to feed 80,000 people for one month – could be delivered to besieged rebel-held eastern parts of Aleppo as soon as possible.
However, some 20 trucks carrying U.N aid and destined for rebel-held eastern Aleppo remained in the customs area on the border with Turkey on yesterday “because of lack of de facto assurances of safe passage by all parties”, Jens Laerke, deputy spokesman for the United Nations office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, told The Associated Press in an email.
“They are at the border with Syria”. USA officials expressed concerns that Moscow might continue to target US -allied opposition forces. “Period. I think they will make common-sense decisions”, he told NPR, just days after the anniversary of 9/11.
“The government … needs to allow unhindered access to those trucks”, Mistura said Tuesday evening in Geneva.
The ceasefire deal calls for the truce to be renewed every 48 hours, and for Washington and Moscow to begin unprecedented joint targeting of jihadists if it lasts a week.
Aleppo had been the center of fighting over the past months and Syrian government forces and their allies launched a wide offensive earlier this month, capturing several areas south of the city and putting eastern rebel-held neighborhoods under siege. “And if this agreement fails, the Syrian Air Force will know where to go to kill all of those rebels that we’ve been supporting”.
The politics of aid in war zones is always complex but it has become especially so with the Syrian conflict where all sides have used aid to further their war aims, although the Assad government is seen by aid agencies as the biggest culprit of all. The Pentagon’s top leaders insisted on the seven-day waiting period, largely due to deep skepticism about Russian Federation.
“From the first minute Russia’s been meeting its obligations to enforce the cessation of hostilities in Syria”, the defense ministry said in the statement.
The U.S. has backed some anti-government rebels, while Russian Federation past year intervened on the side of the Syrian government.
Advertisement
The ceasefire excludes the Daesh extremist group and al-Qaeda-affiliated fighters.
