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.
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He specified that such “facilitation letters”, or permits, from the Syrian government are only needed for aid deliveries within Syria – not aid from other countries.
Syria and Russian Federation earlier said jets from a US -led coalition had struck a Syrian army position near Deir al-Zor, killing scores and allowing Islamic State fighters to briefly overrun it.
A ceasefire deal agreed by Washington and Moscow that went into force at sundown on Monday calls for the demilitarization of Castello Road.
The Syrian army said the bombardment “clearly set the scene for a terrorist attack by Daesh on the position and controlling it”, using an Arabic acronym for Islamic State. “The president has no doubt that will happen”, he said.
UN Security Council members were to meet at 2130 GMT for closed-door consultations, diplomats said, after Russia’s envoy to the UN said Moscow wanted a UN resolution to endorse the deal.
Following the increasingly public divide between the U.S State Secretary John Kerry and Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter over the Syria agreement between Russian Federation and the U.S., President Barack Obama gathered top national security aids on Friday including his secretaries of state and defense – with the shaky ceasefire set to dominate a meeting ostensibly about countering DAESH.
The cease-fire is meant to help set the state for peace talks to end Syria’s civil war, now in its sixth year.
A senior Russian military official said Moscow would help ensure the ceasefire in Syria for another three days, but warned the U.S. to press the rebels to end violations of the truce.
The truce, agreed after marathon US-Russia talks in Geneva last week, is part of the latest bid to end a five-year conflict that has killed more than 300,000 people.
The council will hold closed consultations later on Friday.
Earlier on Friday, Russia said that only Moscow and the Syrian government were fulfilling the deal.
The truce was billed as the “last chance” to end the five-year war but it has been marred by a lack of aid deliveries, sporadic violence and friction between Russian Federation and the United States, which brokered the deal.
Meanwhile, in the eastern province of Deir el-Zour, clashes and shelling over the past 24 hours between government forces and the Islamic State group in the provincial capital, also called Deir el-Zour, killed at least three people, including a child, according to activists and state media.
Russian Federation – which is flying a bombing campaign in support of President Bashar al-Assad – insists that Syrian regime forces are fully respecting the truce, but US-backed rebels are violating it.
“As a whole, you can see that the ceasefire regime is not observed by the opposition groups controlled by the US”.
Turkish chief of staff Hulusi Akar welcomed his Russian counterpart General Valery Gerasimov to Ankara in a ceremony with full military protocol, Turkish television pictures showed.
“We need government permission”, he said.
Mazen al-Shami, an opposition activist near Damascus, said government forces tried to storm Jobar but were repelled by opposition fighters.
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The Assad regime and its allies have violated a cease-fire that came into effect in Syria earlier this week a total of 28 times, a London-based watchdog said Thursday.
