When the guns fell silent in north-west Syria last Saturday, Mustafa al-Nairab was sure it marked a lull, not a ceasefire. One week later, he knows he was right.
From Idlib to Aleppo, which has been a focal point of a four-month Russian air campaign and the partial ceasefire since, there are still jets and helicopters in the sky and artillery rounds thumping into buildings. Just fewer of them.
“The majority of people here thought it was a trick by the regime and the Russians to regroup their troops, then attack,” Nairab said of the Russian- and US-brokered deal to slow the war. “And this is actually happening in parts of Idlib. We can see the planes from where we are. And we can hear the bombs too.”
Before its implementation, the ceasefire was hailed as the most serious effort yet to lead Syria out of its five-year morass. Seven days on, scepticism remain entrenched in communities loyal to the opposition, where the ongoing targeting of towns and villages has garnered next to no international reaction.
A clause to allow continued attacks against proscribed terror groups such as Islamic State and Jabhat al-Nusra has been broadly interpreted by loyalist forces and used to justify ongoing bombing, especially across an area from east of Latakia to west of Aleppo.
How Syrians see this latest phase of war is largely determined by where they live, perhaps even more so now that the battlefield is so palpably changing.
In loyalist parts of the country there is a sense that things are going well, potentially paving the way for negotiations to reconvene in Geneva next week. “Somehow things feel different here now,” said a Damascus-based lawyer who called himself Gabriel. “People are out on the streets, there are no echoes of explosions, and the soldiers are smiling at checkpoints.”
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