‘Agreement’ on UN draft on Syria, but no mention of Assad

There are still gaps to be reconciled between the USA and Russian positions, but the agreement has enabled the Security Council to give its imprimatur to a possible political solution for the first time since the civil war started almost five years ago.

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

“This council is sending a clear message to all concerned that the time is now to stop the killing in Syria and lay the groundwork for a government that the long-suffering people of that battered land can support”, US Secretary of State John Kerry told council after the vote. The passage of the resolution Friday, he said, is a step in the right direction.

Najib Ghadbian, the SNC’s envoy to the United Nations, said opposition groups need “a month or so” to prepare for the political talks that would begin in tandem with a ceasefire.

Russian Federation supports Assad but the United States wants him removed.

Syria’s ambassador to the U.N., Bashar Ja’afari, criticized the “glaring contradictions” between the talk about letting the Syrian people decide their fate and what he called interference in his country’s sovereignty by talking about replacing Assad. But the goal of “credible, inclusive and non-sectarian governance” within six months is hugely ambitious.

“As a outcome, our view has been that you can not bring peace to Syria, you can not get an end to the civil war unless you have a government that it is recognized as legitimate by a majority of that country”.

We see a country in ruins, millions of its people scattered across the world, and a whirlwind of radicalism and sectarianism that challenges regional and global security, he said.

The talks between Syria’s government and opposition should begin in early January, the draft said.

Council diplomats said they aimed to clinch an agreement on a text.

The 15-nation Security Council was scheduled to meet at 3pm to discuss Syria, but it was not yet clear whether they would have a resolution to adopt.

In a meeting last month in Vienna, the International Syrian Support Group agreed it would try to find common ground on which groups fighting in Syria – apart from the Islamic State and Jabhat al Nusra, al-Qaida’s affiliate – could participate in talks with government representatives and which would be barred as “terrorists”. In an opinion column in the British newspaper the Guardian on Friday, he said these actors were trying to differentiate between “good terrorists” and “bad terrorists”.

Western countries have called for his departure, but Russian Federation and China say he should not be required to leave power as a precondition for peace talks. It also endorsed the continued battle to defeat Islamic State militants who have seized large swaths of both Syria and neighbouring Iraq.

“The most important task is to move forward towards a real ceasefire”, Steinmeier added, in a broadcast by his ministry.

But the United Nations representative for the main Syrian opposition group – the Syrian National Coalition – said the deadline was “too ambitious a timetable”.

In a dig at Saudi Arabia, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif wrote in The Guardian on Friday 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”.