Kerry in Saudi Arabia: delayed Syria peace talks to resume

“We hope the negotiating process will begin this month”, he said.

According to Al-Watan, the UN’s special envoy for Syria, Staffan de Mistura, will travel to Riyadh for talks on Sunday and hold a press conference on the Geneva talks on Monday, after revealing that talks were likely to be delayed.

“Russia’s strategy is to weaken the Syrian opposition to the point of elimination, so that in the future Russian Federation may well be able to argue that there is no one to negotiate with”, Lina Khatib, a senior research associate at the Arab Reform Initiative, told the Washington Post on Wednesday.

He added that the opposition needed to choose itself who would represent them at the table, adding that no one had the right to impose anything on the opposition.

“We don’t want to go to Geneva… for photos”. Iran’s foreign minister said on Wednesday it was up to the U.N.to decide who represents the opposition, an apparent contradiction with the United Nations statement that the major powers must agree on which rebel representatives should attend.

Russian Federation and Iran, which support Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, have rejected attempts by Saudi Arabia, which like the U.S. and European powers opposes him, to organise the opposition’s delegation for the talks.

Countries backing the talks, including the United States and Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Turkey, are still at odds over which fighting groups should be branded “terrorists”, a discussion that is expected to continue even as De Mistura shuttles between the rival delegations in Geneva. Moscow, however, views both the Army of Islam and Ahrar al Sham as terrorist organizations.

United Nations diplomats say it looks increasingly likely that the UN-brokered talks between Syria´s government and opposition will be delayed. “They’ve tightened their stranglehold on (rebel) fighters in the Latakia countryside”, Observatory director Rami Abdulrahman said.

“We’re not unmindful of the fact that there still remains differences of opinion, and that this is a complicated process and that there is still quite a bit of work that needs to be done to get the meeting to occur”, State Department spokesman John Kirby said Tuesday.

For the last 18 months, the chief focus of the administration’s Syria policy has shifted from ousting Assad to destroying the extremist group Islamic State.

But naming members of the armed opposition has angered some groups that are part of the Saudi delegation.

Among those are Kadri Jamil, who recently served in Assad’s cabinet and is seen by many anti-government Syrians as a tolerated “house opposition” figure, and a longtime dissident, Haytham Manaa, who served many years in Syrian prisons but was long skeptical of the armed insurgency.

“As Turkey, we do not recognize any [group] other than the Syria national coalition as the opposition”, state-run Anadolu Agency reported Davutoğlu as saying at the World Economic Forum in Davos on January 21.