As Washington and Moscow agreed Wednesday to extend a Syrian ceasefire agreement for another 48 hours, statements by top civilian and uniformed Pentagon officials have raised serious questions over whether the U.S. military brass is prepared to abide by the deal.
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Moscow “calls for the extension of the cessation of hostilities on all Syrian territory for 48 hours”, senior Russian military officer Viktor Poznikhir said, quoted by news agencies.
Under the terms of the deal the US was to convince rebels forces operating under the banner of the Free Syrian Army to disavow the group formerly known as the Nusra Front, al Qaeda’s branch in Syria.
Poznikhir also said some groups controlled by the US like Ahrar al-Sham, has not honored the current agreement.
Pentagon officials on Tuesday refused to confirm whether the Defense Department would implement its side of the deal requiring the US military to share information with Russian Federation on Islamic State targets in Syria following the cessation of hostilities.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which monitors the war through contacts on the ground, said it had recorded no deaths during the first 48 hours of the ceasefire, which came into effect on Monday night, although six civilians had died in Syrian strikes on hardline Islamists excluded from the truce.
While the general lines of the agreement have been made public, other parts have yet to be revealed, raising concerns among US allies such as France, which is part of the coalition attacking Islamic State in Syria and Iraq.
Aleppo-based activist Baraa al-Halaby said no aid deliveries, which are also part of the cease-fire deal, had yet entered the contested area.
Separately, Turkey sent a pair of trucks to the Syrian border town of Jarablus to deliver food and children’s toys on the third day of the Muslim Eid al-Adha holiday.
“You’re talking about not only the Syrian government, but also dozens of armed groups across the country – some of whom may have an agenda of their own”, said David Swanson, a spokesman for the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. “Here is the line that separates civilization and backwardness, barbarity, the line between darkness and light”, said tourism minister Bishr Riyad Yazigi, speaking in the Ramouseh area of the divided city. Many Syrians are skeptical of the deal, and some say the agreement’s central tenet – the very thing that its success depends on – is likely to be its downfall.
If Syrian government forces withdraw from the road, he said, the aid could be accepted provided other conditions were met.
A much-needed aid delivery to 300,000 people in besieged East Aleppo was a key part of the agreement between the government and rebel groups, which came into effect on Monday.
“There are Russian troops [on the road], and we don’t like it”, said Abdelsalam, 26. “And we hope to get that done today”, he said.
But many Islamist rebel groups cooperate closely with Fateh al-Sham, and the biggest of them – the powerful Ahrar al-Sham group – has criticized the terms of the Russian-US deal.
“There is not great confidence that this truce can last longer than the previous one”, George Sabra told Reuters.
More recently, some 50 career State Department employees issued an internal dissent memo in June, calling for the U.S. to launch air strikes against the Syrian government, supposedly as a means of bringing an end to the bloodshed of the five-year-old war that Washington itself provoked in pursuit of regime change.
A senior Russian diplomat says that Syria peace talks could resume as early as later this month. But in spite of those incidents, neither Russian Federation nor the USA appeared to be stepping away from the nascent peace effort. The Syrian government’s air force would also be grounded. Aid convoys, however, have found themselves stalled at the Turkish border, with no insight on when they’ll advance.
The deal has rekindled the sharp tensions within the Obama administration over U.S. imperialism’s proxy war for regime change in Syria.
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The aid organisations in a five-page letter to the United Nations also called for the world body to be more transparent in how it conducts operations in Syria.
