Deal extends cease-fire to Aleppo

U.S., Russia join on effort; Syrians say truce is 48 hours only

DAMASCUS, Syria -- U.S. officials announced Wednesday that an agreement had been reached with Russia to extend Syria's fragile cease-fire to the northern city of Aleppo, although sporadic clashes continue.

The agreement was reached late Tuesday and took effect at 12:01 a.m. Wednesday in Damascus, Secretary of State John Kerry said. The Syrian military confirmed the truce but said it would take effect today and last for 48 hours. U.S. officials said they were looking into the discrepancy.

The U.S. and Russia finalized a nationwide cease-fire in late February but have struggled to make it stick. Kerry has expressed hopes for a more sustainable arrangement.

Kerry said that since the new truce in Aleppo started, "we have seen an overall decrease in the violence in those areas even though there are some reports of continued fighting in some locations, which does not surprise us because it only went into effect one minute after midnight."

"We expect all the parties ... to fully abide by the renewed cessation in Aleppo, that means the regime and the opposition alike," he said before meeting visiting EU foreign-policy chief Federica Mogherini. "We look to Russia ... to press them for the regime's compliance with this effort, and the United States will do its part with respect to the opposition."

Russia made no official statement, but earlier Wednesday, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told a Russian news service that after the cease-fire, the Syrian government said "the opposition continues to shoot."

Three people were killed Wednesday in renewed shelling by Syrian rebels of government-held areas in Aleppo, state media and opposition activists said.

Lavrov said the U.S. had tried to define the territory of the truce "in such a way as to include a significant part of the positions held by the Nusra Front."

He added, "This was absolutely unacceptable, and at the end we managed to strike it down."

Rebels fighting in Aleppo did not immediately react to the news. But Kurdish forces said the besieged, predominantly Kurdish neighborhood of Sheikh Maqsoud appeared to be excluded, saying that opposition forces shelled the district Wednesday evening, killing one person and wounding five.

The cessation of hostilities, as diplomats call it, doesn't apply to the Islamic State extremist group or the Nusra Front, al-Qaida's Syria affiliate.

In some battles in Aleppo and elsewhere, Western and Arab-backed militants have fought alongside those swearing allegiance to al-Qaida, making it hard to determine whether Syrian government offensives or Russian airstrikes against them constitute violations.

The violence in Syria's largest city, which was once its key commercial center, has continued for almost two weeks despite intense diplomatic efforts to restore the cease-fire.

State Department spokesman Mark Toner said the U.S. and Russia would monitor the truce closely. "Attacks directed against Syria's civilian population can never be justified, and these must stop immediately," he said in a statement.

The deal on Aleppo follows reaffirmations earlier this week of truces in the Damascus suburbs and coastal Latakia province.

Kerry and the U.N. envoy for Syria, Staffan de Mistura, said last week that the U.S. and Russia had agreed to assign additional personnel to Geneva to work around the clock to create a better mechanism for monitoring a new cease-fire.

De Mistura said the alternative to a cease-fire in Aleppo is "catastrophic," raising the possibility that 400,000 people could head for the Turkish border.

"The test is Aleppo now," he said after meeting the German and French foreign ministers Wednesday in Berlin.

At a Wednesday emergency session of the U.N. Security Council to discuss the escalation, Jan Egeland, a Norwegian diplomat who is a senior adviser to the United Nations relief effort in Syria, warned that thousands of Aleppo residents were at risk of siege.

"Besiegement is worse in Syria than in any other place on earth," he said.

State TV said government troops repelled an overnight rebel attack on an Aleppo suburb controlled by the government. Pro-opposition activists confirmed the report, adding that government forces regained control of a shopping mall that has become a new front line with rebel fighters in the western part of the city.

The head of the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, Rami Abdurrahman, described the clashes as some of the worst between the government and rebel fighters over the past year in Aleppo.

Nearly 300 people have been killed during this latest spate of violence in Aleppo. Over the past two weeks, hospitals and civilian areas in the divided city have come under attack from government warplanes as well as rebel shelling.

In the eastern Ghouta, near Damascus, Toner said a truce will be extended for 48 hours after overnight airstrikes by President Bashar Assad's government.

"Our objective remains, and has always been, a single nationwide cessation of hostilities covering all of Syria -- not a series of local truces," Toner said.

Information for this article was contributed by Albert Aji, Mathew Lee, Zeina Karam and Sarah El Deeb of The Associated Press and by Anne Barnard and David E. Sanger of The New York Times.

A Section on 05/05/2016

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