US unveils new Syria ceasefire after Trump meets Putin

Bloomberg

US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin agreed to impose a new cease-fire in southwest Syria in a bid towards resolving that nation’s intractable civil war, trying again to cooperate in an area where the two countries have repeatedly failed.
Speaking after Trump and Putin met at the Group of 20 summit in Hamburg, Germany, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson portrayed the truce as a first step towards broader cooperation with Russia in Syria, as IS faces defeat. The agreement goes into effect July 9.
“People are getting tired, they’re getting weary of conflict and I think we have an opportunity, we hope, to create the conditions—and this area in the south is our first show of success,” Tillerson told reporters in Hamburg. “We’re hoping we can replicate that elsewhere.”
Tillerson reiterated the US belief that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad should not be part of the country’s political future, a key sticking point with Russia in the past. It was Russia’s intervention in late 2015 that shored up Assad’s regime and enabled it to regain territory from extremists and other rebels.
Despite the optimism emerging from the Hamburg meeting, recent history has shown how hard it is to make a truce in Syria stick. President Barack Obama’s administration announced a cease-fire agreement last year with Putin’s government. That plan collapsed almost immediately in the wake of a US-led coalition airstrike that killed about 60 Syrian soldiers—which the Americans said was accidental—and a subsequent Syrian attack on a humanitarian aid convoy.
Many of the details of the cease-fire haven’t been hammered out, including which country’s troops will monitor the agreement, according to a senior State Department official who briefed reporters after the announcement. That contradicted Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, who told reporters that Russian military police would do the job.
The official, who asked not to be identified, said Russia had indicated Syrian’s government was willing to go along with the deal.
Previous disputes between the US and Russia since Trump took office have led to breakdowns in communication over the two countries’ use of force in Syria. Trump’s decision in April to launch a cruise missile attack on a Syrian air base following a chemical weapons attack blamed on Assad’s forces infuriated Moscow, as did a later US shoot-down of a Syrian fighter jet.
In addition, the 6 1/2-year-old civil war has transformed into one of the most complex battlefields in modern history, populated with IS militants, Kurdish fighters, other armed opposition groups of various stripes, and military forces from Russia, Turkey, Iran, and the US. An estimated 470,000 people, including 55,000 children, have been killed, according to the Syrian Network for Human Rights.
Tillerson said he believed this cease-fire will succeed where others failed because the war against IS is winding down and all sides are thinking more about Syria’s future.
He only briefly mentioned the myriad, fractured opposition groups that are battling Assad for control across the country. It was the chaos sparked by that conflict that allowed the IS to take root in Syria, and the sides haven’t made any progress towards talks on resolving the country’s political future. “We’ll see what happens as to the ability to hold the cease-fire but I think part of what’s different is where we are relative to the whole war against ISIS, where we are in terms of the opposition’s position,” Tillerson said.