“ISTANBUL “ As a cease-fire in Syria entered its third day, authorities said Wednesday that the government was to begin withdrawing forces from a strategic road in the besieged rebel-held area of Aleppo, a move that would open the way for United Nations relief shipments.
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“It’s hard to get the opposition to go along with something that they suspect and know that the regime will take advantage of to find a military solution to the conflict”, says Andrew Tabler, a Syria expert at the Washington Institute for Near East Peace.
That means the deal that Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov agreed to last week in Geneva first needs a waiver from a skeptical Defense Secretary Ash Carter to be legal. Underscoring the complexity of the new arrangement, even Kerry stumbled over some of the particulars while speaking shortly after the cease-fire came into effect Monday.
But many Islamist rebel groups cooperate closely with Fateh al-Sham, and the biggest of them – the powerful Ahrar al-Sham group – has criticised the terms of the Russian-US deal.
A senior United States official said there had been “a significant drop in the level of violence” although it was still to early to tell if the ceasefire would hold.
It was not immediately clear whether the insurgents were part of the ceasefire, although the senior USA official said all groups except Nusra and Islamic State had to abide by the cessation of hostilities rules. The Syrian army said it would abide by the cease-fire until midnight Sunday, while maintaining its right to defend itself against any violations.
United Kingdom humanitarian aid spokesman David Swanson said “things are taking longer than we’d hoped”, going on to describe how warring sides were blocking aid reaching opposition-held eastern Aleppo. Many there consider the United Nations, which works with the Syrian government for humanitarian access, complicit in the siege. Details of who is to distribute the aid were still being worked out.
“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. Turkish ground forces joined Syrian rebels to expel Islamic State militants from the town last month.
But there are strong doubts it can hold given the myriad competing interests swirling across the country and the deep hostility and lack of trust between the two main protagonists – the regime of President Bashar al-Assad and the armed opposition, which seeks to overthrow him. “But the anticipation and concern for the future leaves a lump in my throat”. Medical facilities in rebel-held areas have been frequent targets for government bombings.
A report by the Russian news agency Interfax said the Russian military targeted Islamic State fighters attempting to attack the ancient city of Palmyra, from which the militants were driven out earlier this year.
At the same time, the Syrian government has accused rebel groups of breaking the truce by firing mortar shells in the countryside near Homs, according to Syrian state media.
Zakaria Malahifji, of the Aleppo-based rebel group Fastaqim, told Reuters that rebel groups intend to comply with the plan to withdraw 500 meters from the Castello Road in order to make it a neutral space, but the government must also pull back.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a UK-based monitoring group, estimates that up to 430,000 people have been killed in the conflict, although an accurate estimate is nearly impossible to obtain.
“The violations are negligible”.
“I think the most important [threat to the agreement] is that the Syrian government has not relinquished its goal of recapturing all Syria in the medium- to long-term”, says Robert Ford, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute in Washington and former ambassador to Damascus.
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Peskov said that’s the “key task, without which further progress can hardly be possible”.
