Russian Federation and the United States reached agreement early today on a new plan to reduce violence in the Syria conflict that, if successful, could lead for the first time to joint military targeting by the two big powers against Islamic jihadis in Syria.
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The ceasefire will be followed by an unlikely new military partnership between the rival governments targeting Islamic State and al Qaida.
“We and the United States take obligation to do our best to engage and make the stakeholders comply with the arrangements in our document, and the Syrians have been informed and agree”, he said.
He called the deal a potential “turning point” in the conflict, if implemented by Syria’s Russian-backed government and US -supported rebel groups.
“Today, the United States and Russian Federation are announcing a plan which we hope will reduce violence, ease suffering, and resume movement towards a negotiated peace and a political transition in Syria”, Kerry said.
“Only the Russian and American air forces will work in these zones”, Lavrov said.
“If this arrangement holds, then we will see a significant reduction in violence across Syria”, Kerry said in an address in Geneva.
A “bedrock” of the agreement, Kerry said, is Russia’s ensuring that Assad’s air force will no longer fly combat missions over opposition and civilian areas.
Shortly before midnight, Lavrov appeared with several boxes of pizza, saying: “This is from the United States delegation”.
Under that next step, the USA would share more intelligence with the Russian military in what’s supposed to become a joint effort to attack terrorist groups, including Islamic State and the Syrian branch of Al Qaeda.
A main point of the agreement is that Russian Federation is supposed to rein in Syrian President Bashar Assad, preventing Syrian government forces from conducting any operations against rebel groups.
Kerry said this cooperation would entail “some sharing of information”, with Russian Federation pertaining to the delineation of the various groups on the battlefield.
As Kerry has negotiated with the Russians over the past several months, officials at the Pentagon and some at the White House have done little to hide their skepticism about the proposed deal.
In a break in proceedings, the United States delegation was to update Washington on progress. The two sides are also holding talks on coordinating more closely the air operations they are both conducting in Syria.
The agreement calls for a nationwide ceasefire to begin at sunset on September 12.
Mr Lavrov said the joint implementation centre would allow Russian and USA forces to “separate the terrorists from the moderate opposition”.
Previous efforts to forge agreements to stop the fighting and deliver humanitarian aid to besieged communities in Syria have crumbled within weeks, with the United States accusing Assad’s forces of attacking opposition groups and civilians.
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Getting Assad’s government and rebel groups to comply with the deal may now be more hard as fighting rages around the divided city of Aleppo, Syria’s most populous and the new focus of a war that has killed as many as 500,000 people.
