In Syria Aleppo’s Kurdish District remain closed despite Truce.

When Israel and the Palestine is all poised for a permanent war cease, Syria still reels under fearsome clashes. On Tuesday, 07th October, at Damascus, the Syrian Defence Minister Murhaf Abu Qasra has agreed to a “comprehensive ceasefire” with the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces commander on all fronts in north eastern Syria.

“A ceasefire was reached in the Sheikh Maqsoud and Ashrafieh neighbourhoods”, the official Syrian News Agency had affirmed. The two Kurdish-majority districts of Aleppo, the country’s commercial capital and its second-largest city, are under SDF control.

Tension has been brewing for days in Aleppo, which is home to tens of thousands of Kurds and had a population of more than two million in 2010, before the civil war broke out in 2011. A US-brokered arrangement for the Kurdish forces to withdraw from the neighbourhoods has repeatedly failed. The militia had initially said it was there for defence purposes. The latest ceasefire however comes amid renewed US efforts to revive a March 10 deal between President Ahmad Al Shara and Mazloum Abdi, head of the SDF, which has maintained its control of large parts of northern and eastern Syria despite regime change.

But Syrian Security Forces were found in patrolling the streets leading to the Kurdish-majority districts of Aleppo on Wednesday, a day after the Defence Minister has proclaimed that truce have halted clashes between the army and the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).

Residents of the Sheikh Maqsoud and Ashrafieh districts were allowed out, but nobody was allowed to move in. “They want to empty the area of its residents, that’s why they’re not allowing us in”, Mohammed Ahmad, a first-year electronic major at Aleppo University, told media personnel on Wednesday. He had left his house in Ashrafieh at 09:00 AM to attend a course which finished two hours later then tried to return home. He then spent most of the afternoon trying to return in several ways. One of them was by going through a park that separates the district from the rest of the city, but the entrance was blocked by security forces. “Go try another way”, a security officer told a crowd gathered at the entrance of the park.

The developments come amid renewed US efforts to revive a March 10 deal between President Ahmad Al Shara and Mr Abdi that would integrate the SDF into the state. US special envoy for Syria Tom Barrack has also been pushing for the agreement. He met with Mr Al Shara on Tuesday and with Mr. Abdi the day before.

Mr Al Shara led Hayat Tahrir Al Sham, a now-defunct Al Qaeda splinter group that ousted the regime in December, but has failed to reach an accommodation with many of the country’s religious and ethnic minorities. One of the personnel manning the roadblock stated “only the Red Crescent can enter”, to bring out humanitarian cases, according to Mr. Al Jali.

Another Kurdish man who works at a hotel as a food hall manager said he slept at his work after being unable to return home in the past two days. On these blocked streets, in a no-man’s land separating the government forces from the Asayish, the Kurdish administration’s internal security forces, who are present within the two districts, both forces can be seen taking sniper positions at times, but so far have refrained from firing.

Team Maverick