“We do not know who will be sitting with us on the other side”.
Advertisement
Mohammed Alloush of the Army of Islam militant group, which is part of the HNC, told reporters at a Geneva hotel that the opposition group was still discussing whether to meet with de Mistura in coming days.
There has been widespread objection in state-controlled Russian media to the list of anti-government groups that were invited for talks in Geneva.
In a reminder of the deepening conflict, Syrian government forces attacked rebel fighters near the northern city of Aleppo, once the country’s commercial capital, threatening their supply lines from the Turkish border, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an opposition monitoring group based in the U.K, said in a statement on Monday.
Earlier, Jaafari had said that the negotiations are still in a preliminary phase and called the opposition “not serious”.
“We agreed and the government delegation agreed with us, that if they are to participate in the negotiations process, they will do so in a private capacity”.
The Observatory said heavy aerial bombardment, presumably from Russian warplanes, helped the troops advance.
The UN envoy for Syria was set on Tuesday (Feb 2) to press President Bashar al-Assad’s government to ease the suffering of ordinary Syrians after declaring the official start of indirect peace talks with the opposition in Geneva.
A correspondent with the pro-government Al Mayadeen TV embedded with the army said there had been 150 air strikes in the last two days.
He was speaking after the second meeting with UN Secretary-General’s special envoy for Syria Staffan de Mistura held in Geneva’s Palace of Nations where the headquarters of the UN European office is located.
In Geneva, meanwhile, both sides have accused each other of bad faith.
The opposition has claimed sieges by Syria and Russian Federation must stop before peace talks can begin.
“We haven’t seen a catastrophe like this since World War II, and it’s unfolding before our eyes”, he said at a conference in Rome on countering the advances of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) group.
During a visit to the UAE on Tuesday, Sergey Lavrov said the inclusion of Jaish al-Islam and Ahrar al-Sham in the opposition negotiating team was “realistic” given the dynamics in Syria, but said their participation did not mean Russian Federation recognised the groups.
Geneva: A scheduled meeting between the United Nations (UN) and the major Syrian opposition on Tuesday afternoon was postponed to an as yet unspecified time.
He said the discussions on Sunday night had involved Saleh Muslim, head of Syria’s most powerful Kurdish party, the Democratic Union Party.
But experts say the West is backing off from demands that Assad leave before any such transition starts, seeing him as a lesser evil than IS.
On Monday, February 1, de Mistura said that the indirect intra-Syrian talks had officially begun.
Lavrov was in the UAE meeting his Emirati counterpart.
Advertisement
De Mistura has decided that these will be “proximity talks”, rather than face-to-face sessions, meaning that he plans to keep the delegations in separate rooms and shuttle between them.
