AFP, Washington :US Secretary of State John Kerry on Monday urged Russia to “restrain” itself and the government in Syria as fierce fighting there continues on the day he had hoped political transition could start.”It is critical, obviously, that Russia restrain both itself and the Assad regime from conducting offensive operations, just as it is our responsibility to get the opposition to refrain from engaging in those operations,” he told journalists.Kerry said the government’s attacks had prevented the warring parties from meeting for negotiations on Monday, the target date set for the regime and opposition forces to agree on the framework of a political transition.”The target date was set with the agreement that the parties were going to be able to go to the talks and begin immediately to negotiate,” he said.”But because of the continued offensive operations of the Assad regime, the opposition found it impossible to sit in Geneva and actually negotiate without the cessation of hostilities.”President Bashar al-Assad’s forces have surrounded rebel-held districts in the city of Aleppo, one of the main front lines in the conflict ravaging the country since 2011.Aleppo’s southern edges have been ravaged by intense fighting in recent days as rebels seek to ease the government siege and cut off the regime’s own access route into the rest of the northern province.Russia and the United States are nominally co-chairs of an international effort to bring Assad’s regime to the negotiating table with armed opposition groups.Hopes for the existing peace process rest on a UN-backed blueprint sketched out by the 22-country International Syria Support Group.Under the roadmap, signed by both Syria’s ally Iran and Assad’s pro-rebel foe Saudi Arabia, a nationwide ceasefire would precede Geneva-based talks on “political transition.”The plan, endorsed by the UN in December, calls for the creation of a transitional body that should have taken place on August 1, followed by a new constitution and elections by mid-2017.”Almost all of the time, from the moment of the announcement of the target date until today, has been consumed by trying to get a cessation of hostilities in place that is meaningful,” Kerry said, implicitly acknowledging the failure to meet the roadmap so far.”These are important days to determine whether or not Russia and the Assad regime are going to live up to the UN, live up to the cycle, or not,” Kerry said. “And the evidence thus far is very, very troubling to everybody.””We will see in the course of the next hours, few days, whether or not that dynamic can be changed.”Meanwhile, Syrian rebel fighters have launched a major assault on government-held southwestern parts of Aleppo to try to reopen supply lines into opposition-held areas of the city after the army and its allies tightened their siege last week.The rebels are trying to break through a strip of government-controlled territory in the hope of reconnecting their area of control in the west of Syria with the encircled sector of eastern Aleppo.A rebel military command centre that includes the newly formed Islamist group Jabhat Fatah al Sham, formerly the al Qaeda-linked Nusra Front, Ahrar al Sham and Free Syrian Army (FSA) brigades said they had seized army positions and some residential compounds in the first few hours of the assault, which began on Sunday night.Later, rebels said they had captured the strategic al-Mishrefah area, south of the Ramousah air force artillery base, which has been used to pound rebel-held areas from its fortified hilltop position.”There is fast and quick progress,” said Abdul Salam Abdul Razak, military spokesman of the Free Syrian Army’s Nour al Din al-Zinki group.However, the rebels still need to advance another 2.5 km and take the artillery base, one of the biggest in Syria, in order to reach fellow rebels on the Aleppo side.The army earlier confirmed on state media that rebels had begun an offensive but said they had been pushed back from the base.A quarter of a million civilians still live in Aleppo’s opposition-controlled eastern neighbourhoods, effectively under siege since the army, aided by Iranian-backed militias, cut off the last road into rebel districts in early July.The army last week took significant ground on the northern edge of the city, around the Castello road, which leads north towards Turkey.
