Kerry Warns About Syria’s Continued Airstrikes

“Could there be such peace talks?”. The fighting is not.

Staffan de Mistura, UN Special Envoy of the Secretary-General for Syria, speaks to the press in Geneva, Switzerland, Wednesday, Feb. 3, 2016.

According to the Syrian government delegation, responsibility for the failed start to the talks rests with Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the Syrian opposition.

Speaking to reporters after a meeting with opposition leaders, Staffan de Mistura said, “This is not the end, and it is not the failure of the talks”.

Both sides remain “interested in having the political process started”, he added.

More than 260,000 people have died in Syria’s conflict and more than half the country’s population have been forced from their homes, including over four million who fled overseas.

“I’m not frustrated I’m not disappointed”, de Mistura said of the pause.

“I have been long enough at the U.N.to know that when you have a five-year war that has had so many hard moments you have to be determined but also realistic”.

The talks began officially on Monday when the United Nations envoy met for two hours with the opposition High Negotiations Committee (HNC) at the United Nations headquarters in Geneva.

“Yes, there is a failure”.

There is also the Ansar al-Sharia (a common name for many Salafist-Jihadist groups in the Middle East) coalition which is explicitly made up of Islamist groups, including, controversially, al-Nusra Front, the Syrian affiliate of al-Qaeda.

As part of the recent offensive, pro-government forces on Wednesday broke a three-year-old rebel siege of two Shiite Muslim towns near Aleppo. Three aid workers were among the dead.

Forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar Assad are now about three kilometers (1.9 miles) away from the city of Aleppo, SOHR head Rami Abdurrahman said by phone.

He said that a supply corridor between the city and the Turkish border had been overrun, and accused Assad of preparing to mount a “siege of starvation” against Aleppo’s 300,000 inhabitants.

If the government regains control of Aleppo, it would be a big blow to insurgents’ hopes of toppling Assad after a war that has divided Syria between western areas mostly still governed from Damascus and much of the rest of the country held by armed groups.

The opposition and government delegations immediately blamed each other for the breakdown in negotiations.

De Mistura halted the talks until February 25 at the latest after meeting the opposition. These were expected to continue for at least six months.

China, a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council, has repeatedly called for a negotiated settlement to the Syrian crisis.

In the eyes of many observers of the 5-year-old war, the lack of progress in the talks was a reflection of the continued unwillingness by all sides to make any of the concessions needed to advance the peace process.

Another BBC report says that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s supporters have also taken the limelight by battling those who didn’t agree with his reign.

“I’m not referring to military activities, I’m saying to an impossibility through military activities and other reasons for the fact that the humanitarian signals which are meant to be sent to the Syrian people – for instance lifting of the sieges, for instance the access for all the places which are at the moment unreachable – should be seen”, he said.

French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius accused Damascus and Russian Federation of “torpedoing the peace efforts” in Geneva with the offensive. Who is bombing civilians and starving people to death.

In another development, US Secretary of State John Kerry has demanded that Russian Federation stops bombing the Syrian opposition, implicitly blaming it for the suspension of peace talks in Geneva. “Not soon, but now”.

“Heavy air strikes by Russian planes” supported the army in its advance, said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based monitoring group.

He said: “The coming days should be used to get back to the table, not to secure more gains on the battlefield”. He posted a photograph on his Twitter account showing hundreds of people gathered at a distance waiting for the supplies to reach them.

But nearly everyone, whether diplomats or the opposition, says it is the USA which is key to success – by using its leverage on Russian Federation. “But the opposite happened”, he said.