Ceasefire starts in Syria’s Hasakah

By Mohammad Misto

DAMASCUS (AA) - The Syrian regime Tuesday announced a ceasefire with the terrorist PYD in northeast Syria’s Al-Hasakah province after a week of clashes between the two sides.

Pro-regime television said that according to a military source speaking on condition of anonymity due to restrictions on speaking with the media, the ceasefire started Tuesday at 14:00 p.m. (1100GMT). The deal calls for an exchange of the dead, wounded, and prisoners, in addition to opening the Al-Hasakah-Qamishli road and roads leading to army stationing areas (of the Syrian regime).

According to pro-Syrian regime television, the ceasefire also provides for the opening of all roads in the city of Al-Hasakah as well as working to solve the Kurdish problem, and beginning to discuss the conditions of laid-off government employees.

Pro-PYD terrorist organization websites said the ceasefire deal provides for the withdrawal of all Syrian regime forces from the city, in addition to assigning the police agency to guard the headquarters of the Syrian regime in a “security box,” along with the retention of PYD militants in areas they took last week.

Those accounts of the deal were not independently verifiable.

In recent days PYD militants have taken many Syrian regime-held neighborhoods and headquarters in the city of Hasakah, and besieged the regime forces in its center and security box, which includes the Syrian regime’s security headquarters.

For more than three years, the forces of the Syrian regime shared control over the Hasakah province’s areas with the PYD. The latest clash is seen as the fiercest one between the two sides, since the Syrian regime used its aircraft and artillery to bombard PYD positions despite U.S. warnings.

Syria has been locked in a vicious civil war since early 2011, when the Bashar al-Assad regime cracked down on pro-democracy protests – which erupted as part of the "Arab Spring" uprisings – with unexpected ferocity.

Since then, more than a quarter-million people have been killed and more than 10 million displaced across the war-battered country, according to the UN.

The Syrian Center for Policy Research, however, put the death toll from the six-year conflict at more than 470,000 people.