The chief peace negotiator of Syria's main opposition bloc said on Sunday he was resigning over the failure of the UN-backed Geneva peace talks to bring a political settlement to the Syria war.

Mohammad Alloush, who is also the representative of the powerful Jaish al-Islam opposition faction in the Saudi-based High Negotiations Committee, told Al Jazeera that the peace talks failed to secure the release of thousands of prisoners languishing in regime custody.

"The peace talks failed to stop the bloodshed of our people, failed to secure the release of thousands of detainees or to push Syria towards a political transition without [Bashar] al-Assad and his criminal gang," he said.

"The Internnational Community need to put serious pressure on Russia and Assad to stop the killing of our people."

The UN-backed parties have not set a date for the resumption of the peace talks after the High Negotiations Committee suspended their participation over intensifying of regime air strikes in recent weeks.

Meanwhile, Syrian opposition forces have taken two villages from ISIL as they fought to undo gains made by the group in a surprise offensive days earlier, activists have said.

Opposition forces retook the villages of Kafr Shoush and Braghida on Sunday, expanding their buffer around the opposition-held town of Azaz, home to tens of thousands of people displaced by war, according to the Local Coordination Committees, an activist network inside the country.

ISIL, also known as ISIS, took Syrian opposition by surprise on Sunday when they launched an offensive that threatened to seize Azaz and isolate Marea, another opposition-held town north of the contested city of Aleppo.

More than 160,000 civilians have been trapped by the fighting. The international medical organization, Doctors Without Borders (MSF), evacuated one of the few remaining hospitals in the area.

The opposition pocket around Azaz, which connects to the Turkish border, is surrounded by ISIL to one side and the predominantly Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) to the other.

The ISIL advance prompted a rare deal between the SDF and opposition forces on Saturday, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a UK-based monitoring group.

It said that the opposition forces surrendered control of a village near Marea to an SDF division in exchange for allowing 6,000 civilians to evacuate to areas under Kurdish control.

Elsewhere in Aleppo, regime air strikes targeted the neighborhood of Sakhour on Saturday and killed at least six people, including five children, the Observatory said.
Fighting continued between regime forces, opposition and ISIL in other parts of the country on Sunday.

Regime forces shelled an opposition neighborhood of Homs, Syria's third largest city, the observatory said on Sunday.

The strikes on the al-Waer neighborhood killed at least seven people and injured 17, including four children, according to the Observatory.

Al-Waer has been under regime siege since 2013, according to the monitoring group Siege Watch. The UN says nearly half a million people are trapped in sieges in the Syria war.

PHOTO CAPTION

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry takes his seat across the table from Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, for their meeting about Syria, in Zurich, Switzerland, January 20, 2016. [Reuters]

Al-Jazeera