The United Nations Special Envoy for Syria hopes that a meeting expected to be held in Geneva next week with US and Russian officials will pave the way for a resumption of peace talks between the warring parties, his spokeswoman said yesterday.
Jessy Chahine, spokeswoman for Staffan de Mistura, declined to give details of the talks or their participants. “Our hope is that any discussions on Syria will help move forward with the process so we can also get to starting the next round of intra-Syrian talks,” she told a briefing in Geneva.
A high-level meeting of officials from Russia, the United States and the United Nations is due to take place in Geneva next week to discuss the Syrian crisis, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on Thursday, Interfax reported.
Meanwhile, a monitor said yesterday nearly 40 Syrian soldiers and pro-regime fighters were killed when rebels blew up a tunnel under a government position in Aleppo city.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said 38 members of government forces were killed in Thursday’s blast, which brought down a building used by the regime in Aleppo’s Old City.
The monitor had earlier reported a toll of 14.
A video posted online by the Thuwwar al-Sham rebel group purported to show the incident, with members of the force walking though a long tunnel and preparing barrels full of explosives.
“We are now inside the tunnel that will be detonated soon, God willing, the tunnel under the traffic branch building, which is an important headquarters for the Assad regime and its mercenaries,” a rebel says in the video.
The footage then shows a massive blast levelling a multi-storey building, filmed from multiple angles.
A huge geyser of dirt and smoke shoots upwards from the scene of the blast, after which gunfire can be heard.
Aleppo was once Syria’s economic powerhouse, but it has been ravaged by the conflict that began in March 2011.
The city has been roughly divided between government control in the west and rebel control in the east since shortly after fighting began there in mid-2012.
The east of the city has been under siege for the past two weeks, since government forces severed the only remaining supply route into rebel-held districts.
The government advance has raised fears for more than 200,000 people who remain in the east of the city, where food shortages and spiralling prices have already been reported.
In a related development, an American man who died fighting alongside Syrian Kurdish fighters to oust Islamic State from the northern Syrian city of Manbij has been named as Levi Jonathan Shirley.
Shirley, who adopted the Kurdish name of Agir Servan, was killed on July 14, the Kurdish Peoples’ Protection Units (YPG) said in a statement posted on its website on Thursday.
The YPG is part of a US-backed alliance of Syrian Kurdish and Arab fighters called the Syria Democratic Forces (SDF), which launched an offensive in May to seize the last territory held by Islamic State insurgents on Syria’s frontier with Turkey.
The YPG has attracted foreign fighters from around the world, including Britain, Germany, Canada, Australia and Turkey.
A YPG official said in February that seven Westerners had died fighting with the group.
In May, the YPG said a Portuguese national had died, also fighting in Manbij.
The SDF has largely avoided fighting forces allied to Syrian President Bashar al Assad and has focused on battling the hardline Islamic State militants in Syria’s five-year-old conflict.