US Secretary of State John Kerry called his Russian counterpart Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on Friday to demand that Moscow press its Syrian allies to respect a crumbling ceasefire.
“Secretary Kerry said the United States expected Russia to urge the regime to comply with the cessation and that we would work with the opposition to do the same,” US spokesman John Kirby said.
Kerry’s call came as a new round of fierce fighting around the northern city of Aleppo overshadowed peace talks aimed at ending Syria’s five-year-old civil war.
According to Kirby, Kerry told Lavrov of Washington’s “serious concerns over the ongoing threats to the cessation of hostilities in Syria and the urgent need for the Assad regime to stop its violations of the cessation.”
US officials have complained that Russian jets appear to be flying in support of Syrian forces attacking rebel positions in Aleppo, despite having signed on to efforts to promote a political settlement.
A monitoring group said on Friday that at least 210 combatants in Syria’s civil war have died in a surge in violence around the second city of Aleppo this week, a monitoring group.
Among those killed were 82 army troops and pro-regime militiamen , the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
The upsurge in fighting, which the United States says is straining a fragile truce, came as a new round of peace talks got under way in Geneva.
The latest violence came a day after a senior official in Washington told AFP that the United States was “very concerned” about reports of a Russian-backed Syrian government offensive near Aleppo.
Violence around Aleppo has sparked concerns that the ceasefire may not last, partly because rebels are involved in the battles there too.
“Aleppo is the key to war and peace in Syria,” Observatory director Rami Abdel Rahman told AFP.
“Every side in the war has a stake in Aleppo.”
Syria’s conflict began in 2011 as a peaceful revolt, with protests across the country that spread in 2012 to Aleppo province, which borders Turkey.
Meanwhile, Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry discussed the Syria crisis settlement in a phone talk on Friday, Russia’s ministry said in a statement.
Source: News Agencies, April 16
