ERBIL, Kurdistan Region – The Syrian army has announced a ceasefire in the southern part of the country ahead of new peace talks in Astana, but opposition forces have reported that airstrikes continue. The Syrian government announced Monday that they have halted military operations for five days in rebel-held southern areas of Daraa, Quneitra and Sweida ahead of a new round of Russian-sponsored peace talks in the Kazakh capital of Astana starting today, state news agency SANA reported. “In order to support the peace process and the national reconciliations, the hostilities in the southern region (Daraa, Quneitra and Sweida) have been halted as of 2/7/2017 at 12:00 pm and till 6/7/2017 at 00:00 am,” the Army Command said in a statement. However, just hours after the announcement, rebel fighters and witnesses said the army resumed dropping barrel bombs on the town of Naima near the border city of Daraa, which is located on the border of Jordan. The region has seen almost daily fighting over the past month between rebels and the Syrian government, according to the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR). Some factions of the Syrian opposition will be absent from today’s Astana talks citing Russia’s failure to get the Syrian army and Iranian-backed militias to abide by the ceasefire as well as their unwillingness to end air strikes on rebel controlled areas. "This ceasefire is an attempt by the Russians and the regime to bring back the opposition to Astana and give them assurances on the ground they will stop the shelling on condition they attend," said Sohaib Alraheel, spokesman of Liwa al Furqan Brigades, a faction of the rebel Free Syrian Army (FSA) which operates in southwest Syria. Shortly after the ceasefire announcement, spokesman for a coalition of Western-backed rebel groups, the Southern Front stated that the armed opposition forces were “very distrustful” of the Syrian government’s willingness to abide by the ceasefire, as reported by Reuters. "We had cast doubt on the ceasefire the moment it was announced and knew it would not be different from previous ones. The regime is lying and the Russians are lying and are not serious in achieving a ceasefire," al Rayes said. "The Russians are duplicitous and procrastinating and are part of the problem and so cannot be part of it solution," Rayes added. The Syrian army has not commented on the continued military operations. The last round of talks held in May led to an agreement between Iran, Russia and Turkey to create four de-escalation zones in Syria, one of which is located in the south. Previous rounds of talks in Astana in addition to UN peace talks in Geneva have not made substantial progress in eliminating the six-year civil war in Syria and previous ceasefire attempts have been reportedly violated. In advance of the seventh round of intra-Syrian talks set for July 10-14 in Geneva, Switzerland, the UN Special Envoy for Syria, Steffan de Mistura briefed the Security Council on the Astana talks. Highlighted in the briefing were “serious efforts on the other hand underway to deliver further agreements and implementation agreements regarding the de-escalation zones.” “The opposition experts worked to develop joint technical options regarding the schedule and process for drafting a new constitution and its popular approval,” which Mistura called “exploratory and non-binding.” Mistura said that the government of Syria has committed to the technical process and “it would participate in expert meetings in the framework of technical consultation process during formal sessions of the intra-Syrian talks — but not outside those formal occasions. ”The UN’s Geneva talks aim to broker a political solution to the nearly six-year-long civil war, while the Astana talks have been more military in nature, producing a memorandum on de-escalation zones for the war-torn country. The ceasefire has lacked an enforcement mechanism. Mistura called the attempts “genuine efforts.” “With every week that passes, we know it, without a final arrangement for the de-escalation zones being indeed finalized, the fragility of the ceasefire regime and the risk posed by the fragility increases,” he highlighted.
