On the eve of an worldwide conference aimed at ending Syria’s four-year-old civil war, Iran signaled it might be willing to back away from its insistence that President Bashar al-Assad remain in power.
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More than 250,000 people have been killed since the Syrian civil war began in 2011, while more than 10 million people are believed to have been displaced.
An expanded meeting of the foreign ministers of sixteen countries started on Friday in the Austrian Capital of Vienna to discuss means of pushing forward the political settlement for the crisis in Syria.
Speaking at the close of a day of talks in Vienna on Friday, US Secretary of State John Kerry said: “None of us expected today to walk in and have one side or other say to the other, “Hey, Assad is not an issue anymore” or “Assad is going to do this or that”.
Iran, which was invited to join the talks on Syria for the first time, signaled that it supported a six-month transition period in Syria, which would be followed by elections that would ultimately decide Assad’s fate-arguably buying the Syrian leader more time in power than the USA and its allies are comfortable with.
Residents inspect bodies at a site damaged from what activists said was an airstrike by forces loyal to Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad on the main field hospital in the town of Douma, Syria, October 29, 2015.
Iran has deployed what it says are military advisers to support the government and has had casualties in the conflict, though it denies the presence of Iranian combat troops in Syria.
But the ministers agreed to meet again within two weeks. The participants lined up, broadly speaking, into two groups: A Russian- and Iranian-led group that has been supporting Assad and his Alawite minority government, and an American- and Saudi-led group, including the Persian Gulf states, that has insisted any process must end up with the Syrian leader gone from the country. Assad, a member of Syria’s Alawite minority, won re-election previous year in a vote that Western countries called a sham and his term ends in 2021.
Underscoring the search for a compromise, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius only said Assad should step aside “at one moment or another”. Conscious of the deep divide over Assad’s fate, they left undefined how long he could remain in power under that transition.
“However, Washington is refusing to inform us of the locations of the terrorists and where the opposition is based”, Lavrov told state broadcaster Rossiya on Saturday.
Russian Federation said it would also target Islamic State, but its planes have hit other rebel groups opposed to Assad, including groups backed by Washington.
There are concerns that the broader talks on Syria, with the inclusion of Russian Federation and Iran, may not produce the desired result.
Kerry laid out a series of points that the participating countries agreed on, including defeating the Islamic State group, also known as ISIS or ISIL, and increasing access for humanitarian organizations to deliver aid.
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The US and its allies want to see if Iran “is serious” about reaching a political transition in Syria, State Department spokesman John Kirby said Thursday.
