BEIRUT -- The U.N. envoy for Syria said Thursday that a cease-fire was "largely holding with some exceptions," and opposition activists reported a mounting number of government airstrikes, including a raid in the northern Aleppo province that killed at least six civilians.
Speaking to reporters in Geneva, Staffan de Mistura said he was concerned that fighting northwest of Damascus that has cut off the capital's clean water supply would further escalate and derail proposed negotiations between the government and the opposition to be held in Astana, Kazakhstan, later this month.
The talks are sponsored by Russia and Turkey, which support opposing sides of the Syrian civil war. But the status of the meeting, planned for Jan. 23, is not clear. Rebels say the government's continued campaign for the Barada Valley, the capital's main source of water, has cast the talks in doubt.
The U.N. says the capital has suffered from a water shortage affecting 5.5 million consumers since Dec. 22.
[TIMELINE: Key events in Aleppo since the start of Syria’s uprising ]
The leader of one of Syria's largest rebel factions, the ultraconservative Ahrar al-Sham, said in remarks aired Thursday that the violence in the valley and daily airstrikes on rebel-held areas "are signs of a collapsing truce."
De Mistura said five villages in the Wadi Barada area have reached an "arrangement" with the government, but two villages, including one that holds the source of water, al-Fijeh, have not.
"There is a danger, a substantial danger, imminent danger, that this may develop into a further military escalation," further imperiling the water supply, he said.
He also said the cease-fire, which began Dec. 30, should widen humanitarian access to besieged areas but that "unfortunately, that is not the case."
The opposition-run Syrian Civil Defense, a search and rescue group also known as the White Helmets, said its workers pulled the bodies of three children and three adults from the rubble of an airstrike on the village of Babka in the opposition-held countryside west of the once-contested city of Aleppo.
It was not clear who was behind the raid and others like it in the Aleppo countryside. Syrian and Russian aircraft regularly bombed the province before the cease-fire went into effect. The U.S. is believed to be behind a series of strikes in the neighboring Idlib province that activists say have killed several al-Qaida-linked militants.
The raid west of Aleppo followed a day of strikes on two opposition pockets outside the capital, Damascus. The strikes on the Ghouta region, where pro-government forces are waging a ground offensive against rebels, were the first since the cease-fire came into effect, according to the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. Another six civilians were killed Wednesday in an airstrike on the Barada Valley.
In Damascus itself, a suicide bomber killed at least seven people near a sporting club in an upscale neighborhood housing security offices, Syrian state TV reported. The target of the attack was not immediately known.
Neither an agenda for the negotiations Jan. 23 in Kazakhstan nor a roster of who will be attending has been released.
"We had clearly rejected this truce because it is tied to an unspecific political solution that we were not part of drafting," Ali al-Omar, the head of Ahrar al-Sham, said in his first recorded interview, which was posted online. "The guarantor is Russia, an occupying force to Syria that came in support of the regime. Additionally, other factions were excluded from this truce, which is a pretext" for continued attacks by the government and its allies.
The government says Jabhat Fatah al-Sham, an al-Qaida-linked group allied with Ahrar al-Sham, and the Islamic State militant group are excluded from the truce. Moscow has pushed for declaring Ahrar al-Sham a terrorist group, despite the fact that it is taking part in a Turkey-backed operation against the Islamic State in northern Syria.
Also Thursday, Russia said it had signed an agreement with the Turkish army to ensure flight safety over Syria.
The Russian defense ministry said in a statement that the memorandum lays the groundwork for coordination between the two countries' air forces to "prevent accidents involving planes and drones" in Syrian air space.
Relations between Moscow and Ankara took a hit in 2015 after Turkey shot down a Russian fighter jet near the Syria-Turkey border. It took Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan months to apologize for the downing.
After he did, Russia brought Turkey onboard as a key partner to broker a peace settlement in Syria.
Information for this article was contributed by Vladimir Isachenkov, Sarah El Deeb and staff members of The Associated Press.
Syria R/O
A Section on 01/13/2017