Fares Al Mazrouei, Assistant Foreign Minister for Security and Military Affairs also attended the meeting.
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Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi was singled out for praise by Kerry, for coming all the way to United Nations headquarters in NY for just “one day”.
That designation would exclude a group from the political process while implicitly endorsing it as a target for the separate campaigns of airstrikes by Russian Federation and a US-led coalition.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said the resolution sent a clear message that now was the time to stop the killing in Syria.
A group of countries will join Jordan in developing that list, Kerry told reporters, without giving details.
It would be counter-productive not to be trying to grow the cooperation with respect to the fight against Daesh.
This is a clear response to the attempts to impose decisions on the Syrians from outside, including the fate of their president, ” Tass quotes him as saying.
The resolution calls the transition Syrian-led and Syrian-owned, stressing that the “Syrian people will decide the future of Syria”.
Within six months they should agree on an “inclusive transitional governing body with full executive powers”, and within 18 elections should be held for a new government.
Stating that peace and stability would be possible in Syria only after a “fully-authorized” transition government is established to take the country to free and fair elections, a statement by the Foreign Ministry said Assad and all other “bloody-handed elements” of his regime should leave the scene to accomplish this.
The Riyadh conference agreed to set up a 34-member secretariat to supervise peace talks, and that committee will also select the opposition’s negotiating team.
Emphasising the need for a ceasefire monitoring and verification mechanism, the Council asked the UN Chief to report back to it on options with a month, and called on Member States to provide “expertise and in-kind contributions” to support such a mechanism.
Meanwhile, Syria’s main opposition group, the Syrian National Coalition, warned that earlier global hopes for a ceasefire by January 1 were unrealistic.
Kerry said a start to the talks in the middle or end of the month would be more reasonable.
Russian Federation had criticised the Saudi-sponsored opposition gathering for including groups that it considers close to terrorists.
Meanwhile, Finance Minister Omar Malhas commended another Security Council resolution related to combating financing terrorism, noting that the terrorist crimes perpetrated by such organisations prove their followers “seek to destroy shared values”, Petra reported.
Publicly at least, the divide on Assad persists.
“There was a very rigorous discussion this morning, as you might imagine, about who might or might not qualify as a terrorist”, he said.
“How could this man unite a people that he has in part massacred?”
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“There must be safeguards regarding the exit of Bashar al-Assad”, declared Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius.
