Syria itself said its army leadership was studying the proposal for a ceasefire in the 19-month conflict which since the summer has been claiming more than 100 lives a day.
A final decision would be announced on Thursday, the foreign ministry said. “The Syrian government has agreed to a ceasefire” during the Muslim holidays of Eid al Adha that start on Friday, Brahimi told reporters in Cairo, adding that “most” rebel leaders contacted said they also would observe the truce.
“If we succeed with this modest initiative, a longer ceasefire can be built” that would allow the launch of a political process, Brahimi said after talks with Arab League chief Nabil al Arabi. Even as fighting raged on, the UN-Arab League envoy told the UN Security Council a ceasefire would be “small step” toward reaching a settlement but that he was unsure if it would hold, according to diplomats at a closed meeting.
Brahimi also appealed for unanimous support for his efforts to reach a ceasefire, warning the 15-nation council that a new failure among its divided members would cause the 19-month old civil war to spread, the diplomats said.
The UN Security Council is bitterly divided over the conflict, with Western nations pressing for action against the regime of President Bashar al Assad while Russia and China have been blocking these moves. The Free Syrian Army, the main rebel group, said it would cease fire during the four-day Eid provided government forces stop shooting first, but it expressed little confidence in the initiative.
A truce if it were to take hold would be the most important breakthrough since the conflict spread from demonstrations and localised clashes back in March 2011 to engulf the entire country in a full-fledged civil war. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said on Wednesday that the conflict has now claimed more than 35,000 lives.
Brahimi’s predecessor as the peace envoy to Syria, former UN chief Kofi Annan, announced a short-lived ceasefire in April, two months after being appointed.
Ahead of any ceasefire, at least 63 people were killed on Wednesday, 40 of them civilians, as the army tried to wrest back control of rebelheld enclaves across the country, said the Observatory. At least 20 of the civilians, including eight women and four children, were killed in the rebel-held town of Douma, east of the capital.
Their corpses were found in a building, said the Observatory, citing anti-regime activists who blamed the regime for the deaths.
The army, for its part, said rebels were responsible, giving a toll of 25.
The monitoring group said eight soldiers were killed in a car bombing in the northern province of Raqa bordering Turkey, and that warplanes raided the rebel-held town of Maaret al Numan. The two sides are battling over Maaret al-Numan for control of a key military base and a stretch of the highway linking Damascus and Aleppo, the country’s second city.
Meanwhile, five members of the same family, including a woman and a child, were killed in an air strike on Maaret Shamirin village in the province, said the Observatory.
Air raids further south targeted Irbin and Harasta, in the Damascus suburbs, where four rebels were killed in clashes, and districts of Aleppo also came under air strikes.
Fighting also broke out near Aleppo airport and the military airport at Nayrab.
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