“They have no pressure to bring against him because there have not been any developments in their [the opposition’s] favour”, the person said. Negotiators on both sides have spent weeks looking at maps of areas where opposition groups operate and where Assad’s forces would be prohibited from launching airstrikes.
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Syria’s opposition was to set out detailed plans yesterday for the transition to a democratic state without President Bashar al-Assad at talks in London with British Foreign Minister Boris Johnson.
Turkey sent tanks into Syria on August 24 as part of the so-called Euphrates Shield operation aimed at ousting Islamic State fighters and halting an advance by Syrian Kurdish forces, which Ankara sees as allies of the outlawed PKK that’s been waging a 30-year insurgency inside Turkey.
Intense fighting between Syrian government troops and insurgents in Syria’s central Hama province displaced some 100,000 people over eight days between late August and early September, the United Nations humanitarian agency said.
U.S. President Barack Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin failed to negotiate a settlement on the sidelines of the G-20 conference in China on Monday.
Both leaders agreed to intensify efforts to this end, it added.
Accusations involving the use of chlorine and other poisonous gases are not uncommon in Syria’s civil war. But U.S. officials indicated the earliest the talks could happen is Friday.
Earlier this month, insurgents pushed northward in Hama province, surprising government troops and dislodging them from areas they controlled around the provincial capital, also called Hama, including a military base and towns and villages near the highway to Damascus. Assad forces and their allies reportedly went deep inside the Ramousa district after capturing the Ramousa Oven and al-Dabaghat Plant in a fierce battle with opposition groups on Tuesday morning.
In a “flash update”, OCHA says figures from a camp coordination group show almost half of the displaced arrived in the neighboring Idlib governorate. “Wherever the regime is driven out of an area, it ends up destroying it”, he said in a text to The Associated Press.
Johnson says in The Times column that Assad can have no part in a future government in Syria.
The opposition hopes new talks would result in an 18-month transition that would see Syria governed by a transitional body made up of opposition figures, current government representatives and members of civil society, according to a 25-page blueprint.
The Syrian conflict began as a mostly unarmed uprising against Assad in March 2011, but quickly escalated into a full-blown civil war.
CORKER: Well it concerns me that we’ve got another 4 or 5 months under an existing president that does have the input of lots of people and has had for 7-1/2 years and that we’ve allowed Syria to devolve into the greatest humanitarian crisis of modern times.
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The High Negotiations Committee envisaged a three-phase plan, beginning with six months of negotiations with Assad’s government to develop a signed agreement on the “basic principles” of the transition process.
