WASHINGTON—The United States, Russia and other world powers agreed to implement a nationwide “cessation of hostilities” in Syria’s civil war to start in one week in an effort to stop the carnage and allow delivery of humanitarian aid to besieged civilians.
The cease-fire will not apply to groups designated as terrorists—namely, Islamic State (IS) and the al-Qaeda offshoot known as the Nusra Front—so that the US-led coalition can continue air strikes against their positions.
The Russians also would be allowed to continue air strikes against what they claim are terrorist groups.
Secretary of State John F. Kerry made the announcement after a meeting in Munich that lasted hours beyond schedule, a sign of the torturous negotiations and deep levels of disagreement among the parties involved in the Syria crisis.
“Obviously it’s been difficult,” Kerry said.
Kerry added that details of the cessation of hostilities had yet to be worked out. That could include ways to monitor and verify the cease-fire.
“This is a pause that is dependent on the process going forward,” Kerry said. But it will have the effect of stopping offensive actions at least temporarily, he said.
“The objective is to achieve a durable long-term cease-fire at some time,” he said.
Russia, which is backing the Syrian government, is proposing a cease-fire to begin March 1. After days of bombing runs that US officials say have killed civilians and moderate US-backed rebels, Moscow has given its ally a clear military advantage.
The suspicion is that Russia would prefer a cease-fire to begin three weeks from now in order to provide time to finish crushing the rebels and return the besieged city of Aleppo, Syria’s largest, to President Bashar al-Assad’s control.
The US, Saudi Arabia, other Arab gulf states and much of the West want to get rid of Assad, saying his brutality and willingness to use chemical weapons against his people make him more suited for a war crimes tribunal than a presidential palace.
But Russia and Iran remain Assad’s firm backers, and their forces have shifted the balance of power in war-torn Syria back to Assad after nearly five years of civil war.
US and European diplomats rejected the Russian proposal, saying the cease-fire had to be immediate.
“The future of Syria and Syrians is in our hands,” European Union foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini said in Munich.
Kerry started Thursday’s meeting with his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, and the two were scheduled to join other members of the so-called International Syria Support Group, a collection of 20 nations working on the conflict, which has fueled the largest refugee crisis in Europe since World War II and killed more than 200,000 people.
The Obama administration also wants a settlement in Syria to allow for more focused fighting to eliminate IS militants, who have used the chaos to take over large swaths of Syria and Iraq before expanding now to Libya.
Kerry tweeted that he “made clear [to Lavrov] the need for immediate progress on humanitarian access, cease-fire.”
“We’re going to have a serious conversation about all aspects about what’s happening in Syria,” he told reporters in Munich. “We will talk about all aspects of the conflict.”
Russian officials have described their cease-fire proposal as “concrete” and “very specific.”
But Russian Presidential Press Secretary Dmitry Peskov was quoted on Thursday in Russia media as saying agreement remained elusive.
“The process is very fragile,” Peskov said. “It would be wrong to talk about any unanimity in the settlement process.”
Far from agreement, Russian and US officials traded accusations at the margins of the Munich meeting. Moscow rejected a US military statement on Wednesday saying Russian warplanes had destroyed two hospitals in Aleppo. Russia insists the damage was the result of US air strikes. US military and State Department officials denied the Russian claim.
More than 50,000 Syrian refugees have fled Aleppo and the surrounding area toward the border with Turkey, where they are in effect trapped.
Already reeling from the influx of more than 2.5 million Syrian and Iraqi refugees, Turkey has refused to allow more to enter. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said doing so would further the “ethnic cleansing” that Assad is causing. He instead called for the establishment of havens in Syria.
The top human-rights official for the United Nations, Zeid Raad Hussein, said the deterioration of conditions in Aleppo, where about 300,000 people may be trapped and under attack, was “grotesque.”
“The warring parties in Syria are constantly sinking to new depths, without apparently caring in the slightest about the death and destruction they are wreaking across the country,” said Hussein, UN high commissioner for human rights.
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization said on Thursday that it plans to deploy warships and surveillance planes to the Aegean Sea to monitor the crossings of thousands of Syrian refugees, who are risking their lives on a daily basis to escape civil war.
Image credits: AP/MATTHIAS SCHRADER