UN calls on major actors in Syria to work for truce

The United Nations urged the United States, Russia, Turkey and Iran on April 6 to help establish a 72-hour cease-fire in Syria in order to deliver humanitarian aid, two days after a suspected chemical gas attack killed at least 86 people in the northern Syrian city of Idlib. 

"We [told] Russia, Turkey, Iran and the U.S. that we need green lights for the full April and May U.N. plan which is to reach more than 1 million people in the hardest-to-reach and besieged civilians of Syria," state-run Anadolu Agency quoted U.N. humanitarian adviser Jan Egeland as saying April 6 after a meeting of the International Syria Support Group's Humanitarian Access Task Force. 

Noting that only one-third of this request had been approved by the Syrian regime, Egeland said this violated what the International Syria Support Group had agreed. 

"We need 72-hour cease-fire in the areas where the battle is now raging," Egeland said, pointing especially to Eastern Ghouta, the last remaining opposition stronghold near the capital. 

"We need a 72-hour pause for Eastern Ghouta, and we need it in the coming days," Egeland said. 

He warned that the some 400,000 people besieged in the area near Damascus "are now suffering alone in the sense that they have a shortage of medical supplies, their hospitals have been bombed, and they are running out of food and other supplies."

The task force meeting also discussed the suspected chemical attack that left at least 86 people dead, 30 of them children, in the rebel-held town of Khan Sheikhoun in northwestern Syria on April 4.

"A war where children suffocate to death because of toxic chemicals is a very, very dirty war," Egeland said.
The international outrage is growing over the harrowing...