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The road also services a major police academy and a compound where United Nations and foreign government staff members and officials live.

The bombing, part of a string of attacks blamed on the Qaeda-linked Al Shabab extremist group that have gripped Somalia in recent months, comes as the country’s leaders struggle to resolve a political crisis that has distracted the government from the deteriorating security situation.

Mohamed Ibrahim Moalimuu, a government spokesman, condemned what he described as a suicide attack, calling it “cowardly.”

“Such acts of terrorism will not derail the peace & the ongoing development in the country,” he wrote on Twitter. “We must unite in the fight against terrorism.”

Witnesses said the explosion could be heard in many of the city’s districts.

The United Nations Assistance Mission in Somalia condemned the attack, and said none of its “personnel or contractors” were in the targeted convoy.

The explosion has hit the country as it undergoes a tense election period that has seen growing infighting among its political leaders.

The political struggle has threatened to tip the country into violent conflict, like the clashes that broke out in April, and reverse the modicum of peace and stability Somalia has achieved in recent years.

As disagreements over the elections have persisted, Al Shabab have stepped up their attacks, particularly in the capital. Over the past two months, the group has carried out car bomb explosions, assassinated government officials and attacked election centers — efforts analysts say are aimed at undermining the electoral process.

The security situation in Somalia is deteriorating, and parts of the country are facing their driest season in around four decades. An estimated 3.8 million people are experiencing acute food insecurity, according to the United Nations, with almost three million displaced within the country.

“As long as the election cycle and current tensions drag on, the attention of the political elite will be more inwardly focused, while other priorities lag behind,”

“This unfortunately creates greater space for Al Shabab to operate.”

“Candles give me anxiety. We spent so much time studying by candlelight after school.”

“It’s a collective trauma in Lebanon, and a complex trauma, because we aren’t talking about one thing, but many events that people have lived through,” said Ghida Husseini, my former therapist in Lebanon who specializes in trauma. “It’s the war, it’s the stress of losing your livelihood and not feeling secure.”

The war lasted for 15 years, until 1990. Tired of waiting, the nation accepted a blanket amnesty for a shaky peace. We watched as militia leaders traded in their blood-soaked fatigues for designer suits and started running the country.

Now we find ourselves waiting, again, as those war criminals-turned-politicians have mismanaged the country — an ongoing banking crisis has seen the currency shed over 90 percent of its value — and skirted responsibility for an explosion at Beirut’s seaport in the summer of 2020.

Reminders of a past war are now staples of the present decay.

“I remember sitting on a mattress as a kid, surrounded by candles. There’s a feeling of being trapped. There is no TV. No music. No electricity. You can’t go outside, it’s too dangerous. All there is — is cards.”

One night, as Raoul slept — his bedroom window had the dining table nailed to it, to protect against snipers — bombing started. His mother cried out for him, looking frantically until they found Raoul, then 5, crying while hugging a framed photo of the Virgin Mary that had fallen from the wall, praying for his life. He developed a stutter after that.

Yet every summer, no matter what happened — an Israeli invasion, the suicide bombing that killed hundred of U.S. Marines — we went back, to be with our family, to hold their hands and say: We have not abandoned you. It was the most twisted of survivor’s guilt

Many are left wondering how their adult lives would be better if their childhoods had been different.

Decades later, sunsets are one of the sources of trauma for him, still.

Because it meant night was coming. And nighttime meant shelling.

“I could have been a better person, a stronger person, maybe wiser, with less fear,” he said. “Especially the fear. Because fear is trauma. I’m a grown man and I'm afraid to walk in the dark. Because to me, the dark is war.”

a major extinction panic happened 100 years ago, and the similarities are unnerving.

The 1920s were also a period when the public — traumatized by a recent pandemic, a devastating world war and startling technological developments — was gripped by the conviction that humanity might soon shuffle off this mortal coil.

It also helps us see how apocalyptic fears feed off the idea that people are inherently violent, self-interested and hierarchical and that survival is a zero-sum war over resources.

Either way, it’s a cynical view that encourages us to take our demise as a foregone conclusion.

What makes an extinction panic a panic is the conviction that humanity is flawed and beyond redemption, destined to die at its own hand, the tragic hero of a terrestrial pageant for whom only one final act is possible

What the history of prior extinction panics has to teach us is that this pessimism is both politically questionable and questionably productive. Our survival will depend on our ability to recognize and reject the nihilistic appraisals of humanity that inflect our fears for the future, both left and right.

As a scholar who researches the history of Western fears about human extinction, I’m often asked how I avoid sinking into despair. My answer is always that learning about the history of extinction panics is actually liberating, even a cause for optimism

Nearly every generation has thought its generation was to be the last, and yet the human species has persisted

As a character in Jeanette Winterson’s novel “The Stone Gods” says, “History is not a suicide note — it is a record of our survival.”

Contrary to the folk wisdom that insists the years immediately after World War I were a period of good times and exuberance, dark clouds often hung over the 1920s. The dread of impending disaster — from another world war, the supposed corruption of racial purity and the prospect of automated labor — saturated the period

The previous year saw the publication of the first of several installments of what many would come to consider his finest literary achievement, “The World Crisis,” a grim retrospective of World War I that laid out, as Churchill put it, the “milestones to Armageddon.

Bluntly titled “Shall We All Commit Suicide?,” the essay offered a dismal appraisal of humanity’s prospects. “Certain somber facts emerge solid, inexorable, like the shapes of mountains from drifting mist,” Churchill wrote. “Mankind has never been in this position before. Without having improved appreciably in virtue or enjoying wiser guidance, it has got into its hands for the first time the tools by which it can unfailingly accomplish its own extermination.”

The essay — with its declaration that “the story of the human race is war” and its dismay at “the march of science unfolding ever more appalling possibilities” — is filled with right-wing pathos and holds out little hope that mankind might possess the wisdom to outrun the reaper. This fatalistic assessment was shared by many, including those well to Churchill’s left.

“Are not we and they and all the race still just as much adrift in the current of circumstances as we were before 1914?” he wondered. Wells predicted that our inability to learn from the mistakes of the Great War would “carry our race on surely and inexorably to fresh wars, to shortages, hunger, miseries and social debacles, at last either to complete extinction or to a degradation beyond our present understanding.” Humanity, the don of sci-fi correctly surmised, was rushing headlong into a “scientific war” that would “make the biggest bombs of 1918 seem like little crackers.”

The pathbreaking biologist J.B.S. Haldane, another socialist, concurred with Wells’s view of warfare’s ultimate destination. In 1925, two decades before the Trinity test birthed an atomic sun over the New Mexico desert, Haldane, who experienced bombing firsthand during World War I, mused, “If we could utilize the forces which we now know to exist inside the atom, we should have such capacities for destruction that I do not know of any agency other than divine intervention which would save humanity from complete and peremptory annihilation.”

F.C.S. Schiller, a British philosopher and eugenicist, summarized the general intellectual atmosphere of the 1920s aptly: “Our best prophets are growing very anxious about our future. They are afraid we are getting to know too much and are likely to use our knowledge to commit suicide.”

Many of the same fears that keep A.I. engineers up at night — calibrating thinking machines to human values, concern that our growing reliance on technology might sap human ingenuity and even trepidation about a robot takeover — made their debut in the early 20th century.

The popular detective novelist R. Austin Freeman’s 1921 political treatise, “Social Decay and Regeneration,” warned that our reliance on new technologies was driving our species toward degradation and even annihilation

Extinction panics are, in both the literal and the vernacular senses, reactionary, animated by the elite’s anxiety about maintaining its privilege in the midst of societal change

There is a perverse comfort to dystopian thinking. The conviction that catastrophe is baked in relieves us of the moral obligation to act. But as the extinction panic of the 1920s shows us, action is possible, and these panics can recede

To whatever extent, then, that the diagnosis proved prophetic, it’s worth asking if it might have been at least partly self-fulfilling.

today’s problems are fundamentally new. So, too, must be our solutions

It is a tired observation that those who don’t know history are destined to repeat it. We live in a peculiar moment in which this wisdom is precisely inverted. Making it to the next century may well depend on learning from and repeating the tightrope walk — between technological progress and self-annihilation — that we have been doing for the past 100 years

We have gotten into the dangerous habit of outsourcing big issues — space exploration, clean energy, A.I. and the like — to private businesses and billionaires

That ideologically varied constellation of prominent figures shared a basic diagnosis of humanity and its prospects: that our species is fundamentally vicious and selfish and our destiny therefore bends inexorably toward self-destruction.

Less than a year after Churchill’s warning about the future of modern combat — “As for poison gas and chemical warfare,” he wrote, “only the first chapter has been written of a terrible book” — the 1925 Geneva Protocol was signed, an international agreement banning the use of chemical or biological weapons in combat. Despite the many horrors of World War II, chemical weapons were not deployed on European battlefields.

As for machine-age angst, there’s a lesson to learn there, too: Our panics are often puffed up, our predictions simply wrong

In 1928, H.G. Wells published a book titled “The Way the World Is Going,” with the modest subtitle “Guesses and Forecasts of the Years Ahead.” In the opening pages, he offered a summary of his age that could just as easily have been written about our turbulent 2020s. “Human life,” he wrote, “is different from what it has ever been before, and it is rapidly becoming more different.” He continued, “Perhaps never in the whole history of life before the present time, has there been a living species subjected to so fiercely urgent, many-sided and comprehensive a process of change as ours today. None at least that has survived. Transformation or extinction have been nature’s invariable alternatives. Ours is a species in an intense phase of transition.”

2. Multiple Soft Targets: The unifying thread in Paris was that all were soft targets and did not appear to hold special significance for the terrorists.

France is among many countries with large, disgruntled Muslim populations

4. U.S. Has Mostly Been Spared:

There's no indication that the migrant influx has led to terror attacks. But the huge flow has shown that there's no real obstacle to moving across borders.

Muslims in the U.S., both those born in America and those who have immigrated, tend to be more successful, better integrated, and have turned to radicalism less often than Muslims in Europe and elsewhere.

5. Racking Up Powerful Enemies: The Islamic State has rapidly accumulated sworn enemies far beyond the borders of Iraq and Syria, and the combined forces lining up against ISIS will put increasing pressure on the group.

France and Russia are now bombing in Syria.

The Islamic State has not suffered any major setbacks since its dramatic rise, and its many opponents have not acted in a coordinated manner.

As French authorities worked to piece together the details Saturday, here are five ways to think about the terror attacks that claimed more than 120 lives in Paris.

Beyond The Middle East: Until very recently, ISIS fought and carried out attacks almost exclusively in Syria and Iraq. But the group has now claimed responsibility or been blamed for major terror attacks in four additional countries in the past month.

suicide bombing that killed more than 100 people at an Oct. 10 rally in Ankara, the worst terror attack in the country's modern history

Lebanese intelligence believes the bombers could be part of a cell dispatched to Beirut by ISIS leadership, the source said, but investigators are still working to verify the surviving suspect's claim

Last month at least 95 people were killed in twin bombings in Turkey's capital, Ankara, ripping through a peace rally near the city's main train station

The attack may have been retaliation for a recent change in Turkey's stance toward confronting the ISIS threat -- shortly before the attacks it had allowed the U.S. to launch strikes on ISIS from Incirlik Air Base in southern Turkey.

Russia's recent, increased involvement in the fight against ISIS has seemingly escalated the terror group's responses.

Egypt's Sinai Peninsula, in which all 224 people on board were killed, the recent attacks in Lebanon and France suggest that the jihadists are lashing out.

A revelation Sunday that at least one of the Paris terrorists who killed more than 120 people on Friday entered Europe under cover as a refugee appears likely to fire up the security debate over what to do with them

Eventually, he made his way to Paris, where he was one of three men who blew themselves up at the Stade de France.

Seven people have been arrested in relation to the attacks in the raids, he said.

The authorities there have been making headway, however. At the beginning of the year a terror cell on the brink of carrying out an attack was the target of a raid which left two suspects dead and a third injured and apprehended.

Abu Nabil, an Iraqi national and longtime al Qaeda operative, was taken out in an airstrike authorized and initiated prior to the terrorist attacks in Paris on Friday night, Pentagon Press Secretary Peter Cook said.

he infamous masked British executioner, who has apparently appeared in a number of gruesome videos in which ISIS captives were decapitated, was very likely killed in a drone strike earlier in the month.

Obama met with Russian President Vladimir Putin on the sidelines of this weekend's G20 summit in Turkey and reportedly reached an informal agreement that there was a necessity for a ceasefire and transitional government in Syria to effectively combat the threat.

Before the question could even be asked, Yousef explained that “the last suicide bombing used by Hamas was in 2004,” saying that the technique of indiscriminate killing was harming the movement.

Though some, including Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, may want you to believe Hamas and ISIS are buddies and would work together, this isn’t the case.

They hoped to have a space where “they controlled what was preached, without oversight,” according to Yousef.

On Aug. 14, 2009, Moussa declared an Islamic emirate from Rafah, directly challenging Hamas rule.

The armed followers of Moussa, Jund Ansar Allah (Soldiers of the Followers of God), and other Salafi offshoots sporadically attacked Hamas positions. They also murdered Italian activist Vittorio Arrigoni in 2011, after attempting to force Hamas to release one of their leaders. Arrigoni’s killing was widely condemned. He was a beloved figure in Gaza.

The rockets were easily dealt with by Israel’s advanced “Iron Dome” missile defense system, and the IAF quickly retaliated by bombing three sites—two belonging to Hamas and another to Islamic Jihad. Israel promises to hold Hamas responsible for any rockets. So, when SOHB bombs, Hamas pays the price.

As long as there is a training ground for ISIS on the other side of our border we will continue to have this problem, not only Turkey but Europe and U.S

Officials quickly blamed ISIS for the attack.

We have a free society ... but there are people who want us harmed,

No group claimed responsibility for the blast, yet Davutoglu pinned blame on ISIS, which has entrenched itself in neighboring Syria and Iraq.

If Tuesday's blast is confirmed to be the work of the terrorist group, that will force Ankara to step up its anti-ISIS fight

An attack like this is designed to create economic, political and social consequences,"

More than half the country's 17 million residents have fled

has begun allowing the United States to launch strikes from Incirlik Air Base in southern Turkey

Those explosions killed as many as 100 people and injured more than 240 others.

Abu Bakr al Baghdad

rusader" countries and beyond.

indiscriminate attacks on civilian targets

, symbols of Western power or decadence

Beyond ISIS "branded" attacks -- those launched by affiliates and members -- ISIS also seeks to make political capital out of individuals who claim to be "inspired" by it, such as those in San Bernardino, California, in December and last week in Philadelphia.

stage of the investigation, there is no evidence accused gunman Edward Archer was part of an organized cell or that other attacks were in the works.

here is no doubting ISIS' lure to a fringe of extremist Muslims and Muslim converts

A year ago, ISIS was focused almost exclusively on carving out its self-declared caliphate. Overseas terror attacks in the style of al Qaeda did not appear high on the agenda

An early indication that ISIS' leadership favored overseas attacks came when the Belgian jihadist Abdelhamid Abaaoud -- a high-profile member of the group, if only a lieutenant -- plotted a series of gun and bomb attacks against police stations

"Know that we want Paris -- by Allah's permission -- before Rome and before Spain, after we blacken your lives and destroy the White House, Big Ben and the Eiffel Tower."

the "caliph" himself, Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, suggested ISIS will look for further opportunities to export its war to the "far abroad."

Throughout 2015, there was a steady stream of terror attacks that could be linked firmly to ISIS-associated groups, even if the relationship between them and the group's central leadership was often opaque

What, if any, role the central ISIS leadership had in the bombing of the Metrojet plane is still unknown. Its Sinai affiliate claimed the attack, and it was some time before the ISIS online publication Dabiq referred to it.

The suicide bomb attacks in Ankara were likely ordered by ISIS itself

The Paris attacks in November were a landmark: the first clearly organized and claimed by ISIS itself from Syria rather than the autonomous actions of affiliates or individuals.

t has a growing network of wilayat, or provinces -- places where it has an established presence such as Libya, Yemen and Afghanistan -- where government is weak and conflict endemic. In some instances it has sent fighters from Syria and Iraq to expand its presence in these places, most notably in Libya.

It also has a pool of experienced foreign fighters

The disappearance of one of the Paris attackers, Salah Abdeslam, and several alleged co-conspirators suggests ISIS may have a network of safe houses and travel facilitators in Europe

In both cases, the U.S. intervened with the initial prospect, perhaps naïvely, of restoring stability after a flashpoint—the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, in 1982, or the rise of ISIS, in Syria and Iraq, in 2014—and of then building on it in broader efforts toward peace. When the going got tough, however, the U.S. retreated from both countries. And chaos erupted.

During the past week, Trump has scornfully dismissed the Middle East—a region with “a lot of sand”—for its endless wars. “They’ve been fighting for a thousand years. Let them fight their own wars,” he said in a joint press conference with the Italian President last week. “That’s the way it is.”

The twin retreats have also included feelings of betrayal—both the betrayal by the Commander-in-Chief of his own military on the ground and the betrayal by those forces of the people they had been deployed to help.

In both cases, the winners were the same—Russia, Iran, Syria, and extremist movements, Geraghty said.

Both U.S. withdrawals also enhanced prospects for jihadism generally. After the U.S. pullout in Lebanon, Hezbollah gained ever wider ground, launching attacks from Israel to Kuwait. It has since become the most powerful militia in the region, with tentacles in Iraq, Yemen, and Syria, where its forces have fought alongside the Assad regime for the past eight years. With the U.S. withdrawal from Syria, the Kurds have lost their partners in the five-year war against ISIS. They alone don’t have the bandwidth to deal with the aftermath, with twenty thousand to thirty thousand ISIS fighters still waging an insurgency across Syria and Iraq.

The attack on Friday broke a relative lull in violence in Peshawar, which has borne the brunt of Taliban militancy in recent years. Sheikh Rashid Ahmed, the interior minister, called the attack an attempt to “disrupt peace and tranquillity of the provincial capital,” according to state-run news media.

In May 2019, ISIS-K created a separate Pakistani chapter, which has carried out attacks in Baluchistan Province, targeting ethnic Hazara Shiites.

Last fall, ISIS-K carried out high-profile bombings at two Shiite mosques in Afghanistan, killing and wounding dozens.

A second mosque attack on Friday, in Paktia Province in Afghanistan, southwest of Peshawar, killed at least three people and wounded more than two dozen after an explosive device was detonated, according to a Taliban spokesman.

December 29 bombing at the city's main train station followed by a December 30 trolleybus blast—have claimed more than 30 additional lives and left many to wonder why Volgograd has become an unlikely insurgent target.

Winter Olympics less than six weeks away,

host city Sochi,

a Russian site dedicated to terrorism and intelligence, says the Volgograd attacks—which took place 400 miles northeast of Sochi—throw such planning into disarray.

"I think the goal was to distract security forces

they'll be forced to think not only about ensuring the safety of the major Russian cities as well as Sochi and the infrastructure around the Olympic facilities," Soldatov says. "On top of that, they'll also have to pay special attention to Volgograd. It's an effective tactic—diverting attention away from a place where the terrorists may be planning their next attack."

Russian authorities, citing similarities in the explosives and shrapnel used in the latest blasts, have acknowledged the two attacks may be linked.

slamic insurgents have frequently sought out high-profile Russian targets, most notably in Moscow.

Volgograd, an industrial city of 1 million, has no evident strategic value as a terrorist target, although its train station—the site of the December 29 blast—is a major transportation hub on the country's north-south rail links.

Volgograd Oblast, the site of a massive purge of 1980s-era communist authorities, is still viewed as one of Russia's most corrupt regions. It is unclear, however, what bearing that might have on its sudden terrorist appeal.

Writing on the website of the Carnegie Moscow Center, director Dmitry Trenin notes that the city, "a symbol of Russia's tragedy and triumph in World War II, h

"But the fact that there have been three attacks in a row in one region—excuse me, but it's a slap in the face of our authorities." 

Russian President Vladimir Putin has responded to the bombings by stepping up security measures across the country, with the Interior Ministry promising special scrutiny of transportation hubs. But inside Volgograd, where local streets were quickly choked with emergency vehicles, correspondents have reported a distinct shortage of police personnel.

"After the first attack, they were supposed to do a lot of work, do something to protect the population. That didn't happen. And the problem isn't where it took place—why it happened in Volgograd Oblast," he says. "The problem is where else other attacks might take place. If it happened in Volgograd, it means it could happen in any city in this part of Russia."

sian spiesBy Michael Martinez, CNNUpdated 8:55 AM ET, Thu January 15, 2015

In fact, while Beirut was once synonymous with violence, when it went through a grinding civil war a generation ago, this was the deadliest suicide bombing to hit the city since that conflict ended in 1990. Lebanon has weathered waves of political assassinations, street skirmishes and wars; Israeli airstrikes leveled whole apartment blocks in 2006. But it had been a year of relative calm.

To be sure, the attacks meant different things in Paris and Beirut. Paris saw it as a bolt from the blue, the worst attack in the city in decades, while to Beirut the bombing was the fulfillment of a never entirely absent fear that another outbreak of violence may come.

Meanwhile, Syrians fretted that the brunt of reaction to both attacks would fall on them. There are a million Syrians in Lebanon, a country of four million; some have become desperate enough to contemplate joining the accelerating flow of those taking smugglers’ boats to Europe.

“This is the sort of terrorism that Syrian refugees have been fleeing by the millions,” declared Faisal Alazem, a spokesman for the Syrian Canadian Council.

“Imagine if what happened in Paris last night would happen there on a daily basis for five years,”

“Now imagine all that happening without global sympathy for innocent lost lives, with no special media updates by the minute, and without the support of every world leader condemning the violence,”

The government can’t protect us,” he said. “They can’t even pick up the trash from the streets.”

Meanwhile, amid complaints from foreign athletes and officials about Russia’s nationwide ban last year on “propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations,” which makes it a crime to mention homosexuality around minors, Mr. Putin said visitors had nothing to fear.

In this country, everybody is absolutely equal to anybody else, irrespective of one’s religion, sex, ethnicity or sexual orientation,” he said. “Everybody is equal. So no concerns exist for people who intend to come as athletes or visitors to the Olympics.”

“Egypt is again an open front for jihad,” said Brian Fishman, a researcher in counterterrorism at the New America Foundation in Washington. “The world is being turned on its head, and, for the United States, the ability to rely on Egypt as a stabilizing force in the region — rather than a source of problems — is really being challenged.

Back then, militants who insisted on armed struggle — including Ayman al-Zawahri, the Egyptian-born Al Qaeda leader — eventually gave up on the utility of armed struggle at home, refocusing on attacking Egypt’s Western sponsorsBut the ouster of Mr. Morsi appears to have changed that calculus.

Now a growing number of experienced Egyptian jihadists are heeding that call, often under the banner of Sinai-based militant groups such as Ansar Beit al-Maqdis, according to United States and Egyptian officials involved in counterterrorism. At least two Egyptians who returned from fighting in Syria have already killed themselves as suicide bombers, according to biographies released by the group.

The Arab Spring revolt that initially carried Islamists to power through democratic elections in Egypt also brought a sectarian civil war to Syria, helped reignite similar fighting in Iraq, led to the near-collapse of the Libyan state and the looting of its arms depots, and opened a broad zone of permeable borders across North Africa that jihadists can traffic with ease.

Egyptian and American analysts initially believed the missile was one of the many basic, Russian-made models loose in Libya after the fall of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi.

scrappily clad in plaid shirts as well as camouflage gear, and armed with hunting rifles alongside their ancient AK-47s.

On October 11, more than 100 parachutes floated down through the night sky over northern Syria

The United States is trying to help relieve the shortage of supplies.

The YPG, a Kurdish group of some 30,000 fighters, is the senior partner in the Syrian Democratic Forces, which also includes some smaller Arab and Christian groups

instalment in a new U.S. strategy

failure

pallet of ammunition.

A Kurdish commander in the province of Hasakah confided

"train and equip"

raw courage of YPG fighters, nor of the Kurdish Women's Defense Unit (YPJ) that fights alongside them.

"They throw themselves into battle, have no sense of covering fire, just charge at the enemy," said a Dutch veteran who is now a sniper with the YPG.

Just weeks ago, a massive vehicle bomb blew up the entrance to the YPG headquarters here.

The camp appears to have been occupied by an elite squad of suicide bombers,

Kurds, Assyrian Christians, different Arab tribes. They fight together and against each other.

e.Other Arabs here resent that the Kurds were slow to join the insurgency against the regime, preferring to sit it out. Even now, the YPG co-exists with a substantial contingent of Syrian soldiers inside Hasakah city. "We have nothing to do with them, though sometimes we have an agreement not to encroach on an area," Commander Lawand told CNN inside the YPG's bombed headquarters. "We are the real opposition to the regime, but first we must fight the terror groups."That's just what the U.S. wants to hear. In the wake of its failed efforts to train and equip moderate rebel groups elsewhere in Syria, there is a lot riding on the Kurds and their Arab allies. American airstrikes were instrumental in helping the Kurds save the city of Kobani on the Turkish border and then pushing ISIS back. In a country of shifting alliances, it's a proven partnership.

The United States is responsible for bringing the various opposition groups in line while the Russians are supposed to pressure the government. Washington and Moscow also agreed to set up a hotline to monitor compliance by both sides.

President Obama sealed the final terms of the arrangement in a phone call with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, who has become perhaps the most influential player in the Syrian war since Russia thrust itself into the conflict in September on behalf of its client, Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad.

The diplomatic efforts did yield a small victory: Aid was delivered for the first time in months to several towns after the combatants gave permission under intense pressure.

On the ground in Syria, the prospects for an end to the bloodshed seemed even more elusive. In the last week alone, more than 100 people in Homs and Damascus were killed by suicide bombings by the Islamic State.

Airstrikes by the Syrian government and its Russian allies in Aleppo and elsewhere have killed scores of people, including in at least five hospitals, one aided by the international charity Doctors Without Borders.

Farther east, scores of civilians were said by locals to have been killed in airstrikes by the American-led coalition fighting the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL.

The priorities, Mr. Obama told Mr. Putin, were to “alleviate the suffering of the Syrian people,” accelerate a political settlement and keep the focus on the coalition’s battle against the Islamic State.

hundreds of thousands of Syrians remain trapped in areas that are classified as besieged or hard to reach, without regular access to food and medicine. Humanitarian groups caution that the more access to aid is used as part of political deals, the less the combatants will provide it unconditionally, as required under international law.

The agreement came after one false start: Secretary of State John Kerry announced in Munich on Feb. 12 that the truce would take effect in a week, but the target date passed as the two sides wrestled over how to carry it out. On Sunday, in Amman, Jordan, Mr. Kerry spoke three times by phone with Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, to iron out the details.

On Monday, while flying back to Washington, Mr. Kerry briefed ministers from Britain, France, Germany, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey about the agreement, according to a senior State Department official. He is expected to discuss the truce when he testifies at a budget hearing Tuesday before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Mr. Kerry has tended to be more optimistic than the White House about the prospects for a diplomatic solution in Syria. But his statement on Monday was also notably reserved. He did not mention the Feb. 27 date and said that while the agreement represented a “moment of promise,” the “fulfillment of that promise depends on actions.”

Analysts expressed skepticism about the deal, noting that in the five days before the truce takes effect, the Syrian forces and their Russian allies could inflict a lot more damage to Aleppo through bombing raids. Some speculated that Russia might expand its military campaign to Idlib, southwest of Aleppo, where Nusra fighters are also operating.

“This depends entirely on the good faith of Russia, Iran and the Assad regime, none of whom have shown much good faith in the last five years,” said Frederic C. Hof, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council who worked on Syria policy during the first term of the Obama administration.

In Riyadh on Monday, a Saudi-backed consortium of Syrian opposition groups and political dissidents said they would agree to the terms of the truce. But Riad Hijab, who coordinates the group’s efforts, did not expect the Syrian government, Iran or Russia to abide by it since, he said, Mr. Assad’s survival depended on “the continuation of its campaign of oppression, killing and forced displacement.”

For the Obama administration, a partial truce in Syria may simply be a way to keep a lid on the violence there while it turns its attention to planning and carrying out military operations against Islamic State fighters in Libya.

Some analysts said the agreement was less an effort to end the fighting in Syria than to ease the bloodshed enough to allow more humanitarian aid to reach stricken cities like Aleppo.

The Islamic State, using its official media channels, claimed responsibility for the blast, which the witness said had wounded dozens in Masaken Barzeh

According to the witness, a large explosion hit the officers’ club, which was frequented by government troops as well as by allied fighters from the Lebanese group Hezbollah.

But the Islamic State is not a party to such deals, and it considers both the national government and the Free Syrian Army to be enemies.

killing more than 20 soldiers and tribesmen, the source added

At least 15 militants were subsequently killed in a gun battle, before Iraqi and US-led air strikes forced the rest of the attackers to retrea

killed another 15 soldiers and tribesmen, the source said

IS leader in charge of setting up car bombs had been killed along with four of his aides

600 and 1,000 IS militants in Ramadi.

strong defensive system in and around the city, including using improvised explosive devices (IEDs) to create minefields

Russia has insisted the plane remained in Syrian airspace. Putin denounced the Turkish action as a “treacherous stab in the back”.

The campaign took advantage of western disarray and galvanised efforts to end the four-and-a-half-year war.

He said Russia was also helping some units of the opposition Free Syrian Army, which were fighting “terrorists” in Syria, providing air cover and supplying them with weapons.

The US and Britain have meanwhile welcomed agreement by Syrian opposition groups to hold talks with Assad in the new year. But the Syrians are still insisting he stands down at once – in the face of strong resistance from Russia and Iran, the president’s closest allies.

John Kerry, the US secretary of state, welcomed the Riyadh agreement by what he called “an extremely diverse group of Syrians” who created a negotiating body to represent them. The last talks between the Syrian government and opposition groups were in Geneva in January 2014 and got nowhere. Kerry admitted, however, that there were still some “kinks” to be ironed out.

The talks excluded Isis and Jabhat al-Nusra, the Syrian affiliate of al-Qaida and an important fighting force, as well as representatives of Syrian Kurdish groups.

Philip Hammond, the British foreign secretary, called the Riyadh agreement an important step ahead of new international talks on Syria in New York next week, following up on what diplomats call the Vienna process. The Syrian negotiations are due to be held in the first half of January.