Russian Federation proposes roadmap for peace in Syria

The document prepared by the Russian government calls for the drafting of a new constitution in the next 18 months.

Syria will not hold presidential elections before Bashar Assad’s latest term ends in 2021, a Syrian MP has said.

Russia, one of Assad’s strongest allies, has proposed an eight-point plan for constitutional reform in Syria to take place over an 18-month period.

Crucial worldwide talks on the Syrian conflict in Vienna this weekend will focus on drawing up an opposition delegation to negotiate with President Bashar al-Assad’s regime, sources said on Wednesday.

Russia’s deputy United Nations ambassador Vladimir Safronkov told AP, he feels saddened that the peace plan is leaked but he stressed that this is Russia’s vision on how peace can be achieved in Syria.

He said that if the Russians successfully pushed ahead with this idea at the next round of Vienna talks and managed to convince other countries, it would be a disaster. “It’s just Russia’s contribution, how we launch a political process…to make parties work together – government and opposition”.

Without explicitly naming Russian Federation, the draft would have the committee saying the United Nations “strongly condemns all attacks against the Syrian moderate opposition and calls for their immediate cessation, given that such attacks benefit so-called ISIL (Daesh) and other terrorist groups, such as al Nusra Front”.

Latakia has been spared the worst of Syria’s civil war but has recently been shelled on several occasions.

Western powers and the Gulf states have long-demanded Assad step down before a peace process in Syria can move forward to end a almost five-year civil war.

Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov said November 10 he hopes one of the outcomes of the upcoming negotiations will be agreement on which groups should be included on the terrorist list.

The Syria resolution would condemn the presence in Syria of “all foreign terrorist fighters … and foreign forces fighting on behalf of the Syrian regime, particularly the al Quds Brigades, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (of Iran) and militia groups, such as Hezbollah”.

The document said the Syrian opposition which takes part in the political process must form a “united delegation ” and be agreed beforehand.

“The Syrian people have never accepted the dictatorship of Assad and they will not accept that it is reintroduced or reformulated in another way”, said Mr Monzer Akbik, a member of the Western-backed Syrian National Coalition. Russian airstrikes assisted the Syrian forces, which have succeeded in recapturing the area south of Aleppo.

Moscow has also said opposition groups must be designated for participation in the peace talks, and it has exchanged a list of 38 candidates with Saudi Arabia.

Israel would closely follow any changes in Russia’s military involvement in Syria since it could hamper its own maneuverability in the country.

Last year, IS killed more than 160 Syrian government troops seized at a military base in the northern province of Raqqa.