If the truce sticks, United Nations aid should go in very, very soon, and the people of Syria can look forward to “no bombs and more trucks”, de Mistura said.
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The UN’s Syria envoy has applauded a fall in violence through the first 24 hours of a fragile ceasefire but said security concerns meant aid convoys had not yet deployed. On Tuesday, calm seems to have prevailed across Hama, Latakia, Aleppo City and rural Aleppo and Idlib with only some allegations of sporadic and geographically isolated incidents.
Security sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity due to restrictions on talking to the media, said 20 aid trucks belonging to the United Nations, crossed into the war-torn Syrian city of Aleppo from the Turkish border town of Cilvegozu in the southern province of Hatay.
By early morning, every report we have been seeing indicates a significant drop in violence, the UN Special Envoy for Syria, Staffan de Mistura, told a news briefing at the UN Office at Geneva. And despite the long odds many give for its success, the deal is largely holding so far.
The truce deal does not apply to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), or Jabhat Fateh al-Sham, the group formerly known as al-Nusra Front that changed its name after cutting ties with al-Qaeda in July.
Speaking earlier in Geneva, Laerke told reporters that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s government had granted permission for aid to reach more than one million civilians this month.
Russian Federation said Syrian government forces were fully respecting the ceasefire but that rebel fighters had violated it 23 times.
In his comments, de Mistura also highlighted a timeline, saying that if the 48-hour benchmark worked out including agreed-upon humanitarian access, with no bombs and more trucks followed by the creation of a joint command centre between Russian Federation and the United States to plan air operations in the country, a meeting on Syria may take place in NY during the General Assembly, and then a Security Council session on 21 September.
Desperately needed aid will also be delivered in the coming days. Hopefully we have another five days of cessation of hostilities and then other benchmarks that are expected to take place, he said.
“We need to enter an environment where we are not in mortal danger as humanitarian organizations delivering aid”.
Over the weekend, Turkey said it was already making preparations to deliver humanitarian aid to Aleppo, where some 250,000 people in the rebel-held east are under government siege. He finished by saying that they had not received the authorizations letters but that they are hoping and expecting the government to send them soon.
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Syria declares its utter rejection of dispatching any materials from any parties, particularly Turkey, without coordination with the Government and the United Nations, said an official source of the Foreign Ministry in a statement broadcast by the official news agency, SANA, picked up here.
