UN Security Council Adopts Resolution on Initiating Political Transition in Syria

His comments came just a day after the UN Security Council backed a peace plan for war-torn Syria that included calls for a ceasefire.

“Given the reality on the ground and the impasse on the fate of Bashar al-Assad, the agreement is absolutely not applicable”, he said.

Syrian president Bashar al-Assad with his wife in a church on December 19, 2015.

The council’s adoption of a resolution on Friday backing the plan comes amid world powers’ growing sense that the top priority in Syria should be the defeat of the Islamic State group, which has exploited the country’s years of chaos and created a base from which it promotes deadly attacks overseas.

Speaking to the Middle East News Agency on the sidelines of the global meeting on Syria in NY on Saturday, Shoukry stressed the need to unify efforts to launch the peace process between the Syrian government and opposition.

The United States and Arab allies remain convinced Assad must leave office as part of the process, but his ally Moscow insists this is a decision for the Syrian people.

“It’s our hope that a nationwide ceasefire can go into effect, excluding only Daesh and al-Nusrah and any other group that we might decide at some time to designate”, he said.

The resolution further calls for the U.N.to present the council with options for monitoring a ceasefire within one month.

French foreign minister Laurent Fabius said the negotiations would succeed only with credible guarantees on Assad’s departure.

US Secretary of State John Kerry said that the world is going to see in the next few months whether the peace process actually takes hold.

Shadow foreign secretary Hilary Benn said: “UN Security Council Resolution 2254 is a very important step on the path to bringing the awful conflict in Syria to an end”.

Earlier this week, diplomats said some progress had been made on the most hard sticking point in the talks: Assad’s fate.

In a dig at Saudi Arabia, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif wrote in The Guardian on Friday that it was “utterly absurd that those who have denied their own population the most rudimentary tenets of democracy … are now self-declared champions of democracy in Syria”.

“Regarding airstrikes, our proposal to coordinate on this remains on the table for two and a half months”, Lavrov added.

More than 250,000 people have died since Syria’s conflict erupted in March 2011, and millions more have fled their homes.

It reiterated previous calls for Member States to suppress terrorist acts by Islamic State, Al-Nusra Front and all others.

Friday’s NY talks were the first by the ISSG since Saudi Arabia gathered a coalition of Syria rebel groups to form an opposition negotiating team.