UN’s Ban urges agreement on opposition list for Syria peace talks

But despite a briefing by the U.N.’s special envoy for Syria, Staffan de Mistura, in a closed meeting on Monday, the Security Council and other countries involved in the conflict have not found consensus on which opposition figures should be invited.

Saudi Arabia, a foe of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, said on Tuesday no one should dictate to the Syrian opposition who represents them at peace talks, as a proposed January 25 meeting looked set to be delayed by differences over who will attend. The diplomat countries include Russia, rivaling countries Saudi Arabia and Iran, Russia and Middle Eastern and other European nations.

The meeting, set on January 25, is a part of a peace process endorsed by the UN Security Council aimed at ending the five-year-old civil war that has killed more than 250,000 people and triggered a mass exodus of 4 million Syrian refugees to Europe.

Asked about the prospects for a delay Uruguay’s Ambassador Elbio Rosselli who holds this month’s council presidency said that “no different date was considered today”.

On Dec. 18, the Security Council adopted a resolution calling for a UN-backed political process that would let Syrian factions form a transitional governing body in six months and to hold UN-supervised national elections within 18 months.

During a briefing Monday, Farhan Haq, a spokesman for UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, said the UN responded to reports of the burgeoning humanitarian crisis as quickly as possible, rebutting a media report in Foreign Policy magazine on Saturday about a sluggish operation and an open letter in which various humanitarian workers claimed the UN allowed people to starve while “chasing permission you do not even need” and failed to draw the world’s attention to the crisis.

“If some well-known opposition leaders are not invited it’s going to make the delegation less inclusive than it should be” saidRussianAmbassador Vitaly Churkin.

In Moscow, Qatar’s Emir Tamim bin Hamad Al-Thani met with President Vladimir Putin, who began their talks by hailing Qatar’s role in regional affairs and voicing hope that they would be able to “search for ways of settlement of the most hard issues”. The issue of Assad’s future also remains a serious stumbling block.

Speaking on the Syria talks, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov rolled optimism and prudence into one. He added that the two nations agreed to “raise the efficiency of anti-terrorist action in the framework of global efforts”.