The worldwide community is mounting its most serious effort yet to end the almost five-year-old Syrian war, rallying around a second round of talks in Vienna this week amid the emergence of a Russian proposal that calls for early elections.
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The plans include a constitutional reform process in Syria, lasting 18 months, to be followed by presidential elections.
– Submitting the draft constitution to a popular referendum, and “after its approval an early presidential election will be called”.
Also Tuesday, Syrian government forces broke a siege imposed by the Islamic State group on a northern military air base since 2013, marking the first major achievement by Assad’s troops since Russian Federation began its airstrikes in late September, state media said.
A draft plan by the Kremlin, titled “Approach To The Settlement of The Syrian Crisis”, states “the president of Syria will not chair the constitutional commission”, instead calling for “a candidate agreed by all sides” to lead the creation of the constitution.
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.
“We do not believe that it is going to be possible to bring the opposition groups into the political process and have an effective ceasefire unless we have a clear point at which President Assad will depart”, he told reporters at the United Nations.
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 United States and its European and Arab allies are demanding that Assad be forced to step down at a few point in a transition, but Iran and Russian Federation disagree.
USA intelligence officials hope the crash of a Russian passenger jet in Egypt, which was apparently caused by a bomb, would force Russian President Vladimir Putin to take a tougher line against Daesh, according to The Daily Beast.
Aleppo’s Kweires airbase, the Russian Defense Ministry is claiming it was helped along with location information provided by Syrian opposition groups.
But the document does not specify that Assad would not be allowed to stand in those elections.
But even if global actors are able to agree on a list of “terrorist” or “extremist” groups that will be targeted militarily and excluded from the transition process, on the battlefields away from the negotiation tables things are much messier.
The Syrian army meanwhile has broken a siege in the north.
“The Syrian leadership lives in a reality of its own”.
By The Associated Press Ninety-seven years ago, an armistice ended World War I, which was then the greatest conflict the world had ever seen.
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“We talked to him three hours ago, and he is in high spirits”, the mother of Lieutenant Iyad Salameh said.
