U.S. secretary of state John Kerry and his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov are due to meet in Zurich on Wednesday to try to settle differences between Syrian opposition groups over who will attend the meeting between the government and opposition scheduled for January 25th.
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Representatives at the conference signed a final statement calling for a unified Syria with a representative government that would replace the Assad administration after a transitional period, and a 15-member negotiating team was reportedly chosen for the Geneva talks.
Lavrov said contacts in this format were needed to help ensure a long-term solution for the conflict between Kiev’s forces and pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine. “This is the position of Russian Federation and the U.S.”.
The comments by Adel al-Jubeir came after the United Nations on Monday said it was waiting for regional powers leading the Syria peace process to agree on participants for the negotiations.
Russian Federation and Iran, which support Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, have rejected attempts by Saudi Arabia, which like the United States and European powers opposes Assad, to organise the Syrian opposition and delegation for the talks.
Tensions between Saudi Arabia and Iran, which intensified with the Saudi execution of a dissident Shiite cleric this month, are hampering the peace effort in Syria, Putin said last week.
United Nations spokesman Farhan Haq said Monday that the 25th remains the target date for the meeting.
The planned Geneva talks are part of a peace process endorsed by the U.N. Security Council last month in a rare display of global agreement on Syria, where a five-year-old civil war has killed at least 250,000 people.
Riad Hijab, who heads the council, accused Russian Federation of impeding negotiations, and also said the opposition could not negotiate while Syrians were dying as a result of blockades and bombardment. He also announced the names of opposition figures that would take part in any talks.
Rebel groups are reporting intensified air strikes and ground assaults in areas of western Syria that are of greatest importance to Assad.
A commander in the Ahrar al-Sham rebel group said the government and its allies were trying to advance towards the Turkish border. Both groups want the Assad government out and an Islamic state in its place, but the leader of Jaish al-Islam later softened his stance, saying the Syrian people should decide their future.
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However, they would “follow them in those forms which will be most useful for the Syrians to reach agreements, how they will jointly solve the problems of the transition period, what the new constitution will look like, how to prepare new elections and many other issues”, he said.
