Once any joint US-Russian operations begin, Syrian government warplanes will no longer be able to fly in any areas of Syria where there is opposition or Fatah al-Sham presence.
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Although the full details of the agreement, reached by the United States and Russia in Geneva after prolonged negotiations, remain unclear, analysts say the deal appears weighted in favor of the Assad regime and its Russian and Iranian allies rather than the Syrian opposition.
Since the cease-fire came into effect at sunset on September 12, accusations have been made against both rebels and government forces of sporadically violating it, but it appears to have largely held.
The deal is the latest in a succession of attempts to end the fighting in Syria.
Furthermore, Washington has evolved from a critic of Russia’s year-old intervention in Syria to a battlefield ally of Moscow as they prepare to launch airstrikes against extremist groups.
Under the deal, the United States and Russian Federation are aiming for reduced violence over seven consecutive days before they move to the next stage of coordinating military strikes against Nusra Front and Islamic State militants, which are not party to the truce.
The Observatory said its records show that since the crisis began in March 2011 and until a truce went into effect on Monday evening, 301,781 people have been killed in Syria. Little wonder, then, that there is such widespread pessimism about the durability of the cease-fire arrangement.
The head of Russia’s ceasefire monitoring centre in Syria, Vladimir Savchenko, said that the Castello Road – the key supply route to the battleground city of Aleppo – had come under mortar fire. “So it’s hard to see how a cease-fire can last when the Syrian government nearly certainly will be testing the edge of the envelope to see how far it can go, one village here, a small street there, without drawing massive Russian condemnation”.
Ban said the United Nations hopes to take advantage of the cease-fire deal reached over the weekend after marathon negotiations between U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov to “immediately deliver vital humanitarian assistance to Aleppo and other besieged and hard-to-reach locations”.
The deal calls for a renewal of the truce every 48 hours, and for Washington and Moscow to jointly target jihadis like “Islamic State” and Fateh al-Sham, which are not included in the ceasefire.
The truce brokered by Russian Federation and the United States began at sundown on Monday, in the latest bid to end a conflict that has killed more than 300,000 people since March 2011.
The U.N. envoy Staffan de Mistura hailed a “significant drop in violence” over the first 24 hours of the cease-fire, but said no U.N. aid trucks have yet moved across the Turkish border into Syria. The global body has repeatedly criticised the Syrian government for restricting access, especially to besieged areas, and for removing vital items from convoys.
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”.
“Unless civilians are taken off the bull’s-eye, nothing good can happen in the political-diplomatic sphere”, says Mr. Hof, also a former State Department official working on transition in Syria. Military and defense leaders question whether Russian Federation will be able to force the Assad regime to uphold the cease-fire.
Still, the clause that states mainstream rebel factions must disassociate from extremist groups, namely IS and Jabhat Fateh ash-Sham, could alone lead to the unraveling of the agreement.
Aid agencies say they are waiting in other cases for guarantees of safe passage from not just President Bashar al-Assad’s regime but also from other warring parties.
Apart from the some limited military support for Syrian rebel groups, the U.S. government has sought to avoid being sucked into the Syria conflict.
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The truce that began at sundown on Monday, agreed after marathon US-Russia talks in Geneva between Lavrov and Kerry last Friday, is part of the latest bid to end a five-year conflict that has killed more than 300,000 people.
