A truce which comes after several days of intense fighting. The ceasefire agreement in northwestern Syria, announced Thursday by Russia and Turkey, came into force on Friday morning.
After several days of intense fighting that caused a humanitarian catastrophe, the Russian and Syrian air strikes stopped, this Friday, in the province of Idleb. Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced earlier, at a joint press conference in the Kremlin, a ceasefire from midnight Friday, a decision after an escalation of violence in the Idleb region.
A common "safety corridor" established
UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres has hoped that the ceasefire agreement will lead to "an immediate and lasting cessation of hostilities", while the Security Council has scheduled a meeting on Friday from from 6 p.m., at the request of Russia. Moscow has requested that the meeting be held behind closed doors to brief members of the Security Council on the ceasefire agreement, a diplomatic source said. According to the text of the agreement, Russia and Turkey will organize from March 15 joint patrols on a large portion of the M4 motorway, a crucial axis for the regime crossing the Syrian region of Idleb.
It will be the first time that Russians and Turks have patrolled together in this area. Moscow and Ankara have also planned to set up a "safety corridor" six kilometers deep on either side of this highway, a buffer zone of 12 kilometers wide in total. The parameters defining this zone will be defined within seven days, according to the text. Agreement must end weeks of heavy fighting around Idleb, the last bastion of rebels and jihadists in northwestern Syria where Turkey intervened against Bashar al-Qatari forces Assad, supported by Russia.
"Our goal is to prevent the humanitarian crisis from getting worse"
The violence has caused a humanitarian catastrophe, with nearly 500 civilians killed and around one million people displaced towards the Turkish border. The Turkish ministry added early Friday that Turkish armed drones had "neutralized" 21 Syrian soldiers in gunfire at 4 p.m. local time on Thursday in response to the 34 Turkish soldiers killed last weekend. "Our objective is to prevent the humanitarian crisis from worsening," said Recep Tayipp Erdogan in Moscow, warning, however, that his country "reserves the right to retaliate with all its strength and everywhere against any attack by the regime" in Damascus .
Speaking before his Turkish counterpart, Vladimir Putin had expressed the hope that this text would serve as "a solid basis for putting an end to the fighting in the de-escalation zone of Idleb" and for "stopping the suffering of the civilian population". The intensification of the fighting in Idleb had led to diplomatic tensions between Russia, an ally of the Syrian regime, and Turkey, which supported the rebels, posing a risk of direct confrontation between these two countries which imposed themselves as as main international actors in the Syrian conflict. Turkey, which already hosts 3.6 million Syrians on its soil, Wednesday demanded European support for "Turkish political and humanitarian solutions in Syria".
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