Syria ceasefire holds for first hours, only minor violations reported

Monitoring groups: 15 hours into week-long truce brokered by US and Russia, country mostly quiet

By AP 13 September 2016, 12:17 pm

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Syrian civil defense volunteers, known as the White Helmets, gather in a street in the northern city of Aleppo on August 6, 2016, in celebrations after rebels said they have broken a three-week government siege on the northern city.(AFP PHOTO / THAER MOHAMMED)

BEIRUT — Syrian opposition activists and monitoring groups said the ceasefire in Syria appeared to be holding since coming into effect the previous night, despite sporadic and minor violations.

Rami Abdurrahman from the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said “calm is prevailing” in most of the country on Tuesday morning, though there were minor violations in central Hama province.

Another activist group, the Local Coordination Committees, reported some shelling in Aleppo and the southern region of Quneitra, while state media said there were “breaches” of the truce by rebels in the contested city of Aleppo.

Ahmad al-Masalmeh, an opposition activist in the southern province of Daraa — where Syria’s crisis began in 2011 — said the region was also calm.

The week-long, US- and Russia-brokered ceasefire started at sunset Monday.