Aleppo residents ventured out onto the streets on Monday, taking advantage of a lull in violence in the northern Syrian city as the United States pushed to salvage a ceasefire More than 250 civilians, including 50 children, have been killed in and around Syria's second-biggest city since April 22, in regime air strikes, rebel attacks and clashes.
After another night of raids gave way to calm, residents were able to take to the streets and some shops were reopened, said an AFP correspondent in the city. It came as US Secretary of State John Kerry held talks in Geneva with the UN's Syria envoy Staffan de Mistura and the Saudi foreign minister in a bid to revive a February 27 US-Russian brokered truce. Kerry told reporters he would work "in the next hours" to rein in violence on the ground and that a group of ceasefire monitors would track violations "24 hours a day, seven days a week". But on Monday afternoon the calm was broken when rebels fired rockets at western districts of Aleppo that are under government control, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitor said.
There were no casualties in the attack which came after the heavy overnight strikes on several rebel-held areas of eastern Aleppo, including the teeming Bustan al-Qasr district, it said. It was not clear if Syrian or Russian jets carried out the raids on the rebel-held areas, said the Britain-based monitor. Rebel shelling of government-controlled western areas of Aleppo city late Sunday killed three civilians including a child, the Observatory said.
Growing violence in and around Aleppo has threatened both a UN-backed peace process and the Russian-US brokered ceasefire. "We are talking directly to the Russians, even now," Kerry said in Geneva after a week in which Moscow refused US calls to rein in its ally, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Aleppo was initially left out of a deal to "reinforce" the February 27 truce between the government and non-jihadist rebels. The freeze in fighting, announced on Friday, applied to battlefronts in the coastal province of Latakia and Eastern Ghouta, near Damascus.
State television reported a Syrian army announcement on Monday that the freeze had been extended for another 48 hours in Eastern Ghouta, until 1:00 am Wednesday (2200 GMT Tuesday). The same "freeze" is set to last until 1:00 am Tuesday in Latakia, a regime stronghold. The head of Moscow's co-ordination centre in Syria, Lieutenant General Sergei Kuralenko, has said that talks to include Aleppo in the lull had begun. Meanwhile the Observatory reported a prison munity in central Hama, where it said detainees took hostage some guards after a government bid to transfer prisoners to the Saydnaya province near Damascus. And in the Ghouta region, rival Islamist rebel groups were locked in fierce clashes to control territory, in which artillery was being used, said the monitor. More than 270,000 people have been killed since Syria's conflict erupted in March 2011 with protests demanding Assad's ouster.
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