REPORT: Ceasefire in Syria's Homs extended - governor

A humanitarian ceasefire in the Syrian city of Homs was extended on Thursday for three more days, the city's governor told Reuters.       

"The ceasefire has been extended for an additional three days, starting from today, to allow the evacuation of the remaining civilians," Talal al-Barazi, the governor, said by telephone.        

He added that a total of 1,400 people had been evacuated from the besieged Old City since last Friday, when the U.N.-brokered ceasefire began.    
     
Of those, 220 were still undergoing background checks, he said, meaning they were being detained for questioning.

This comes as Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Moscow had presented a draft U.N. Security Council resolution on "fighting terrorism" in Syria in addition to its attempt at a resolution on aid access there.

"Terrorism is certainly no less acute a problem (than the humanitarian crisis)," Lavrov told a news conference.

Lavrov also said that Moscow had presented its own draft UN Security Council resolution on humanitarian aid access in Syria after rejecting a rival Western-Arab text.

"We have presented our own draft resolution on Syria to the UN Security Council," Lavrov told a news conference, adding that it laid out "our vision of the role the Security Council can play if we want to foster a solution to the problems and not antagonize one side or the other".

Mediator Brahimi:

The United States and Russia have pledged to help unblock stalled negotiations between Syria's two warring sides, international mediator Lakhdar Brahimi said on Thursday.
   
"They have kindly reaffirmed their support for what we are trying to do and promised that they will help both here and in their capitals and elsewhere to unblock the situation for us because until now we are not making much progress in this process," Brahimi told a news conference after holding a two-hour meeting with senior U.S. and Russian officials in Geneva.
   
"Failure is always staring at us in the face. As far as the United Nations is concerned we will certainly not leave one stone unturned if there is a possibility to move forward. If there isn't, we will say so," he said.

On the field:

Syrian opposition sources said on Thursday that the Syrian regime air force is pounding the strategic town of Yabroud, in the region of Qalamoun north of Damascus where some activists say that rebels are preparing to resist a ground offensive.

This comes as at least 51 people, including 13 rebels, died in a single day of Syrian government airstrikes and shelling of opposition-controlled districts of Aleppo, activists said Thursday as international mediators were trying to salvage faltering peace negotiations in Geneva.
 
The Britain-based Observatory for Human Rights said most of the victims were killed by airstrikes and barrel bombs dumped on eight rebel-held districts of the northern city on Wednesday.
 
The rest died from artillery shelling, sniper fire and in clashes between forces loyal to President Bashar Assad and rebels fighting to overthrow him.
 
The bombings in Aleppo, Syria's largest city, are part of a campaign by Assad's forces to wrest control of neighborhoods that were seized by rebels in mid-2012.
 
The Observatory has been documenting Syria's conflict since its start in March 2011 through a network of activists on the ground.
 
It released its report on the latest Aleppo casualties on Thursday, ahead of a trilateral meeting between senior U.S. and Russian officials and U.N. mediator Lakhdar Brahimi, and Syrian government and opposition representatives in Geneva.
 
A second round of talks started in Switzerland on Monday but the discussions quickly became mired in acrimony as government and opposition delegates hurled accusations for the bloodshed taking place back home, failing to even agree on the talks' agenda.
 
The Observatory said that at least 4,959 people have died in Syria in the three-week period since Jan. 22, when the government and opposition delegates sat down for the first round of face-to-face meetings in Geneva. The Observatory said in a report Wednesday that the period has seen the highest death toll since the uprising against Assad started nearly three years ago.
 


REUTERS/AP


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