United Nations envoy declares ‘official beginning’ for Syria peace talks

Representatives from Syrian opposition groups said they had a positive meeting with UN Special Envoy Staffan de Mistura on Monday.

“The regime is the one killing the Syrian people”, said Salem al-Mislet, spokesman for the largest opposition coalition, the High Negotiations Committee, when asked by a Russian Federation reporter about the militant Army of Islam group that is in the opposition’s delegation.

“We will continue to side with and to open our arms to the Turkmen and all other oppressed people”, Akdogan said.

De Mistura also threw out a “challenge” to the International Syria Support Group – led by the United States and Russian Federation – that held a key meeting in Vienna in November that helped pave the way for the Geneva talks: He said they had pledged to help support efforts to stop the fighting.

However, after meeting with de Mistura Tuesday morning, the Syrian government’s chief negotiator told reporters that they still don’t know who the opposition delegation is and whom they will negotiate with.

A Western diplomat said that on Sunday de Mistura made proposals to what he called a mistrustful HNC in talks in a Geneva hotel, but that they were still hesitating.

The opposition delegation has insisted it will not formally join peace talks until those humanitarian demands are met.

“De Mistura had a feeling, his own interpretation that actually the conditions for declaring the official beginning of the talks had been created”.

The second point was to determine lists of the names of the opposition figures to hold the indirect dialogue with and the third point was about the role of the other opposition groups present in Geneva, according to the sources, who noted that the delegation awaits answers.

The head of the government delegation, Bashar al-Jaafari, has said the opposition is “not serious” about peace and that there should be no preconditions for talks.

Army of Islam official Mohammed Alloush, gets in to a auto heading to a meeting with the opposition’s High Negotiations Committee, in Geneva, Switzerland, Tuesday, Feb. 2, 2016.

More than 250,000 people have died in nearly five years of war in Syria.

Jaafari on Tuesday also criticised the opposition for failing to condemn multiple bomb attacks Sunday at a revered Shiite shrine south of Damascus that killed more than 70 people.

Global powers should immediately begin talks on how to enforce a ceasefire, he said.

A sustained assault against opposition-held territory in Latakia province has brought the Syrian government and its Russian ally into open conflict with the Turkish government, which sees itself as the protector of Syria’s ethnic Turkmen.

Scheduled meetings come against a backdrop of stalemates as two past initiatives failed to make headway in solving the political crisis pitching Syrian president Bashar al-Assad against anti-government forces, with terrorist factions such as the Islamic State (IS) and Al-Nusra also in the mix. Opposition activists and residents say there are dozens of cases of severe malnutrition in Moadamiyeh.

The British-based Observatory monitoring group said government forces were gaining ground in the area, and had captured most of the village of Duweir al-Zeitun near Bashkoy.