Russia says it’s edging closer to deal with US on Aleppo

Russia, which has sent troops to help its longtime ally President Bashar al-Assad amid Syria’s more than five-year-long civil war, last week announced three-hour humanitarian pauses over three days in Aleppo – a measure immediately slammed by the United Nations as inadequate.

Senior Russian and United States military officials have held Geneva negotiations on Aleppo and on restoring an overall ceasefire, UN Special Envoy for Syria Staffan de Mistura said last Thursday. “We are now in a very active stage of negotiations with American colleagues”.

Sergei Shoigu said in remarks carried Monday by Rossiya 24 television that “step by step, we are nearing an arrangement, I’m talking exclusively about Aleppo, that would allow us to find common ground and start fighting together for bringing peace to that territory, that long-suffering land so that people could return to their homes”.

Russian Federation backs Assad in the five-year-old Syria conflict, while the United States wants to see Assad step down. “We remain in close contact (with Russian officials)”.

A Syrian military official said the Syrian air force launched “precise airstrikes on groupings and movements of terrorist groups south and west of Aleppo” that resulted in the death of dozens of “terrorists”. Shell-fire is constant, with houses, schools and hospitals all in the line of fire. “People live in a state of fear”, ICRC president Peter Maurer said in a statement from Geneva. Children have been traumatized. The scale of the suffering is huge, ” Maurer said in a statement.

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In the interview conducted on Saturday but shown only on Monday, Shoigu said Moscow was in “active” negotiations regarding the city, where Russian planes and regime forces are battling rebels for control.

“In the eastern part of Aleppo, people are hostages”, he said, accusing the rebels of planting bombs along escape routes established by Russian Federation and of staging executions.

The development followed intense and deadly battles around Aleppo and stepped up airstrikes by the Syrian and Russian air forces in Aleppo and nearby Idlib province.

“(They should) sit down at the table and negotiate”, Bogdanov told the RIA news agency, saying he would meet representatives of the Syrian opposition in the Qatari capital, Doha, on August 16. But opposition activists and militant websites said Monday that the insurgents retreated following a massive government counterattack. He said it did not know which “opposition” Bogdanov was referring to.