US officials unsure of deal as Kerry arrives for Syria talks

“There is a pattern here – the closer Russian Federation and the United States get to an agreement on close cooperation in a decisive confrontation with ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra in all their incarnations in Syria, including affiliated groups, the more high-profile and brazen the attacks of the terrorists become”.

For Staffan de Mistura, UN special envoy on Syria, the situation of 250,000 people in eastern Aleppo was becoming urgent. But the truce collapsed and President Vladimir Putin’s Russian Federation has maintained strong support for Assad’s forces, while Washington has encouraged the opposition rebels.

That would followed by a more wide-ranging cease-fire, along the lines of a truce agreed last February that lasted only several weeks.

The Syrian government has effectively stopped aid convoys this month and the besieged city of Aleppo is close to running out of fuel, making U.S. The Pentagon is backing local ground forces and conducting airstrikes against the Islamic State. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, center left, reacts as he arrives in Geneva, Switzerland Friday, Sept. 9, 2016. “I apologize for the delay but we can not help it”, Lavrov told reporters who had assembled to hear the announcement. “We’re just not there yet”.

The officials declined to elaborate on what Washington might do if the talks broke down.

Senior State Department officials briefing reporters played down the prospect of a final breakthrough with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov today. That pattern continued throughout the day, with frequent pauses for consultations at home. It was unclear how long the talks would go on. -Russian counterterrorism alliance, only a year after Obama chastised Putin for a military intervention that USA officials said was mainly created to keep Assad in power and target more moderate anti-Assad forces.

It had looked like a deal would not be forthcoming on Friday night, with Mr Lavrov blaming Washington for the impasse.

In a speech at Oxford University in England on Wednesday, Carter downplayed hopes of reaching an agreement with Russian Federation regarding peace in Syria.

Meanwhile, media reports said that Kerry and Lavrov were expected to meet in Geneva to discuss the Syrian crisis, despite a recent telephone conversation that revealed wide disagreements between the two officials over a solution to the five-year-old conflict.

Kerry made a decision to travel Thursday afternoon to Geneva after receiving a written response from Moscow. “The Russians have conditions they want to see met and addressed; we have our own”.

Issues still to be resolved were “highly technical and complicated”, the official said.

“We have been taking issues off the table because we’ve reached an understanding on them and continue to have some issues that remain outstanding and that we have been unable to close”, an official was quoted as saying by the Reuters news agency.