“We can not accept the attempt by the group which met in Riyadh to assign itself the right to speak on behalf of the entire Syrian opposition”, the ministry said in a statement.
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Saudi Arabia’s Foreign Minister says that Syrian President Bashar Assad has two choices: “either to leave through negotiations” or ‘be forcibly removed from power’.
“The outcome is somewhat positive… but it is fragile and the process can collapse at any time”, he said.
Those talks, expected to take place next month, are part of a road map outlined by world and regional powers in Vienna to move closer to a political solution of a conflict now in its fifth year.
Under the agreement, opposition groups have formed a “supreme committee for negotiations” based in Riyadh which will act as a reference for their negotiating team, whose members the body itself will choose.
The meeting excluded Islamic State (IS), al-Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra and the main Kurdish force in Syria.
Iran is a crucial ally of Assad in Syria’s four-year-old civil war.
Military groups will be represented by Western-backed Free Syrian Army groups in the north and the south of the country, with eight representatives.
It would see a transitional government set up within six months and elections held within 18 months, and calls for negotiations between the opposition and Assad s regime by January 1.
But some of the delegates to the Riyadh meeting said it signed the final communiqué anyway, indicating possible rifts within the group itself.
Saudi Arabia hosted a three-day meeting of “moderate” Syrian opposition figures in hopes of forging a unified stance on how to end the ongoing conflict in war-torn Syria.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said there are “kinks” (issues) that must be worked out in the framework agreement reached this week by Syrian rebel groups for peace talks with the government.
“So far, we’ve been seeing that some countries, including Saudi Arabia, the United States, and some Western countries wanted the terrorist groups to join these negotiations”, he said in an interview on Thursday with Spanish news agency EFE.
It did not say whether a meeting of the 17 nations of the International Syrian Support group would proceed as planned in NY on Friday.
“We appreciate that this extremely diverse group of Syrians put aside differences in the interest of building a new Syria”, he said in a Thursday statement.
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Like the Iranian official media, he plays up reports of opposition disunity, in particular over the composition of a delegation for the next stage of talks.
