BEIRUT -- United States and allied aircraft will be banned from flying over much of Syria as part of a deal struck by Iran, Russia and Turkey to foster a cease-fire in the Syrian war, a senior Russian diplomat said Friday.
But State Department spokesman Edgar Vasquez said later that the agreement does not "preclude anyone from going after terrorists wherever they may be in Syria."
Vasquez said the Russians' interpretation of their own agreement "makes no sense." A State Department envoy was at the talks in Kazakhstan where the deal was reached, though the United States was not one of the signers of the agreement.
The deal went into effect at 12:01 a.m. today. There were limited reports of bombing in northern Homs and Hama, two areas expected to be part of the "de-escalation zones," activists said. There were no immediate reports of casualties.
The Russian diplomat, Aleksandr Lavrentiev, suggested that Russian and Turkish warplanes also would be prohibited from flying in the four designated de-escalation zones, where Syrian government and rebel forces are supposed to stop fighting one another.
But Lavrentiev seemed to sketch out a broader geographical no-fly zone for U.S. and coalition military planes. He said they would be allowed to fly only in eastern Syria over areas held by the Islamic State extremist group, apparently excluding the entire western spine of the country.
The agreement to establish the de-escalation zones has not been accepted by all opposition groups, and the Syrian government reserved the right to continue fighting what it called terrorist organizations across the country, factors that could undermine the latest attempt to forge a cease-fire.
Rebels have expressed concerns that the deal is a prelude to a partitioning of Syria into spheres of influence.
Osama Abo Zayd, a spokesman for the Syrian military factions at the Kazakhstan talks, said in an interview that it was "incomprehensible" for Iran to act as a guarantor of the deal. A cease-fire is unsustainable in the presence of the Iranian-backed militias in Syria, he said.
"We can't imagine Iran playing a role of peace," Abo Zayd said.
Late Friday, a Syrian opposition coalition, the Higher Negotiating Committee, denounced the deal in a statement. The Western, Saudi-backed group said the deal lacks legitimacy and seeks to divide the country.
The group also said the deal was an attempt to neutralize rebel-held areas and give Syrian government troops the military victories they could not achieve on the battleground. The group called on the U.S. and other Arab-allied countries to prevent the implementation of the deal.
Nevertheless, at least one of the representatives of the Syrian opposition groups at the talks in Astana, Kazakhstan, Col. Ahmad Berri, sounded optimistic, saying he expected to see a full cease-fire in the designated zones.
"The Russians this time are more serious, we sensed it, more than last time," he said.
No-fly zones have been a contentious issue in the Syrian conflict, now in its seventh year; they have long been requested by rebel groups and rejected by the government. Disputes about who can fly planes and when -- "subtle professional issues," the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, called them recently -- are likely to continue under the new deal.
Disputes about the details of agreements in the Syrian civil war have always made negotiations thorny. For example, in the de-escalation deal, it wasn't clear how the special zones will be enforced.
Russian Lt. Gen. Sergei Rudskoi told reporters Friday that personnel from Iran and Russia, which back the Syrian government, and from Turkey, which backs some rebel groups, will operate checkpoints and observation posts.
He said "security belts" will be created along the borders of the de-escalation zones to prevent skirmishes between opposing sides. The checkpoints and observation posts will ensure free movement of unarmed civilians and humanitarian aid and will facilitate economic activities, he said.
The idea of armed monitors is a new element -- observers deployed in the early years of the Syrian conflict, including United Nations and Arab League observers, were unarmed.
But it's unknown how many boots on the ground would be needed to monitor the yet-to-be mapped areas or how and where exactly Russian, Iranian and Turkish troops would patrol.
"If that happens, we would be looking at a more serious effort than anything in the past," Aron Lund, a Syria expert with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, wrote in an article Friday.
Lund said that from the outside, the agreement "does not look like it has great chances of success" and seems to "lack a clear mechanism to resolve conflicting claims and interpretations."
The government of Syrian President Bashar Assad said in a statement this week that it "supports" the initiative on de-escalation zones, "including not shelling those areas."
But the statement also said the Syrian military would continue to fight banned terrorist groups such as the Islamic State, al-Qaida-linked militants, "and other affiliated terrorist organizations wherever they were all over the Syrian territories."
That language was interpreted by many government opponents as a signal that the Syrian military intended to keep bombing wherever it chose on the pretext of fighting terrorism.
In answer to a question about the U.S.-led coalition formed in 2014 to fight the Islamic State, Lavrentiev did not mince words.
"The work of aviation, especially the forces of the international coalition, is absolutely not envisaged. With notification or without notification, this issue is now closed," he said.
Lavrentiev added: "The only place where the international coalition's aviation can work is on the objects of the Islamic State that are located in the Raqqa area, some populated areas in the area of the Euphrates, Deir el-Zour and further on the Iraqi territory."
That indicates the U.S. military would no longer be allowed to fly over a number of critical areas where it already conducts operations and that it would be barred from all of the most important areas contested by the government and rebels unaffiliated with the Islamic State.
But the Pentagon also vowed that the de-escalation agreement would not affect the U.S.-led air campaign against the Islamic State.
"The coalition will continue to target [the Islamic State] wherever they operate to ensure they have no sanctuary," said Marine Maj. Adrian J.T. Rankine-Galloway, a Pentagon spokesman.
The areas where coalition flights would be banned include Idlib province, where U.S. warplanes have been carrying out a series of airstrikes against what officials say are al-Qaida operatives. They also include some of the areas where Turkey, a NATO ally, has skirmished with Kurdish militias that are backed, sometimes with airstrikes, by the United States.
And they include most of the Syrian government's military installations, such as the Shayrat air base, which the United States struck with missiles in retaliation for chemical attacks that killed scores of people in the rebel-held town of Khan Sheikhoun in Idlib province last month.
The de-escalation zones are along Syria's southern border with Jordan, in the eastern Damascus suburbs, in Idlib province, and in a pocket of the central province of Homs.
Rudskoi said Russia had already halted air assaults in those areas as of Monday.
Rebel commander Jamil al-Saleh, in northern Hama, said that nearly an hour after the deal went into effect, battles raged with government forces. The area, south of Latamneh, is expected to be part of the deal. Al-Saleh said government shelling was intense amid an attempt to advance in the area, the scene of fierce battles for weeks. "What deal?" he scoffed.
Information for this article was contributed by Anne Barnard, Sophia Kishkovsky, Hwaida Saad and Gardiner Harris of The New York Times; by Sarah El Deeb, Lynn Berry, Zeina Karam, Jim Heintz and Robert Burs of The Associated Press; and by Henry Meyer of Bloomberg News.
A Section on 05/06/2017