All eyes on Syria as ceasefire deadline looms

The Islamic State group has claimed responsibility for a suicide truck bombing in central Syria.

The Observatory said intense fighting is ongoing near the northern town of Khanaser between troops and pro-government gunmen against IS.

The complexities of Syria’s battlefields – where moderate rebels often fight alongside jihadist groups like Al-Nusra – have cast serious doubt on whether the ceasefire effort will succeed.

Rudskoi said that 17 opposition units have contacted the Russian military to adhere to the truce.

They met in Munich and pushed for a ceasefire deal, resulting in an agreement on a “cessation of hostilities” that President Bashar al-Assad’s government and the opposition have both said they could support.

The Syrian opposition has agreed to abide by the truce but expressed major concerns and reservations about what it said were ambiguities and the lack of any clear mechanism to implement the agreement.

The alliance, known as High Negotiations Committee, said in a statement on Friday that 97 factions will abide by the truce.

July 2011: As the government crackdown intensifies, a group of Syrian military officers defect and form the Free Syrian Army. Asked what, if anything, the Syrian regime can do to stop an attack, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry says Assad “could turn over every single bit of his chemical weapons to the worldwide community in the next week”.

“We understand fully and take into account that this will be a complicated, and maybe even contradictory process of reconciliation, but there is no other way”, Putin said in televised comments.

Millions of Syrians have been displaced in the civil war which has led to a refugee crisis in neighboring nations, and in Europe.

In the weekly address to legislators from his ruling party Tuesday, Ahmet Davutoglu says the aim is to establish a terror “structure” – made up of the Islamic State group and the U.S.-backed Syrian Kurdish militia group YPG – in Syria’s north. Turkey considers the YPG a terrorist organization because of its links to Turkey’s outlawed Kurdish rebels.

Ibrahim Kalin, spokesman for President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, told reporters on Friday that the Saudi deployment to Incirlik air base has started. The report did not provide further details.

With the ceasefire due to take effect at 2200 GMT on Friday, US President Barack Obama has warned Damascus and key ally Moscow that the “world will be watching”.

Peskov dismissed the report, saying that Russian Federation was focusing its firepower on the Islamic State, Al-Nusra Front and other extremist groups designated as legitimate targets by the UN Security Council, and would continue doing so after the ceasefire takes hold.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring organisation reported at least 26 air raids and artillery shelling targeting the town of Douma in rebel-held Eastern Ghouta near Damascus.

Russian Federation and the Syrian government and the U.S.-led coalition, according to the agreement, are allowed to keep on striking at the Islamic State group and the Nusra Front during the cease-fire.