48-hr truce takes hold in Syria's battered Aleppo

A 48-hour truce took hold in Syria's war-torn Aleppo city yesterday as key regime backer Russia blamed the United States for the lack of progress in peace talks.

The local ceasefire came hours after US Secretary of State John Kerry warned Moscow that Washington's patience was running out over breaches of a nationwide truce.

Aleppo has seen some of the worst fighting in a war that has killed more than 280,000 people, but there is deep scepticism that the latest halt to fighting in the northern city will last.

Peace talks aimed at ending the five-year conflict have stalled and the February 27 countrywide ceasefire between the regime and non-jihadist rebels lies in tatters.

"There is no progress in the political process," Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said at an economic forum in Saint Petersburg, referring to Syria.

He accused Washington, which supports Syrian rebels, of being "unable or unwilling to put pressure on its allies in the region".

Nevertheless, direct contact between Russia and the United States about Syria have taken place "without any hysteria", he added.

There have been repeated violations of the February 27 truce in Aleppo, with rebels pounding regime-controlled neighbourhoods with rocket and artillery fire and the regime hitting rebel areas with air strikes.

The new 48-hour ceasefire was announced by Moscow late Wednesday in a bid to halt violence in the city, split since 2012 between a regime-held west and a rebel-controlled east.

Meanwhile, United Nations rights investigators said yesterday Islamic State jihadists are still committing genocide against the Yazidi minority in Iraq and Syria.

"Genocide has occurred and is ongoing," Paulo Pinheiro, head of the UN Commission of Inquiry (COI) for Syria, said in a statement.

"ISIS has subjected every Yazidi woman, child or man that it has captured to the most horrific of atrocities," he added, using another acronym for the jihadist group.

The Yazidis are neither Muslims nor Arabs and follow a unique faith despised by IS. The Kurdish-speaking minority is mostly based around Sinjar mountain in northern Iraq.

In 2014, IS jihadists massacred Yazidis in Sinjar, forcing tens of thousands of them to flee, and capturing thousands of girls and women as spoils of war to be used as sex slaves.