“There’s no point in meeting in NY or anywhere else without defining terrorist groups”, he said.
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Western-backed FSA brigades have repeatedly said that Russian Federation is in fact targeting them with air strikes along with other rebels fighting against President Bashar al Assad’s forces, rather than Moscow’s stated aim of hitting the so-called Islamic State (IS).
A spokesman for Russian President Vladimir Putin has refuted the president’s statement earlier Friday that Russia is supplying weapons to a leading Western-backed opposition group in Syria.
But Abdulaziz Sager, the Saudi academic who moderated the meetings, said afterward that the representative of the group had not known about the statement and had signed the final agreement anyway – suggesting a split between the group’s political officials and its hard-line base.
The opposition is not only divided between rebel factions on the ground, who differ on ideology and compete for territory, but also between those factions and an array of political figures including both exiles and people who have remained in Damascus through much of the conflict.
The powerful Ahrar al-Sham group pulled out of the opposition conference in Saudi Arabia on Thursday in protest over the role given to groups it said are close to the Syrian government, signaling continued divisions among rival factions ahead of the proposed peace talks.
Russia’s nuclear forces, a heavy focus of the rearmament program, are also set to receive five new regiments of ballistic missiles in 2016, Shoigu said.
Attacks by Islamic State and its supporters in the Middle East, Europe and the USA, a surge of refugees and the risk of the conflict widening as Syria’s neighbors and world powers are drawn in have added urgency to global peace efforts.
Even in the firmly anti-Assad media there is scepticism about whether Russian Federation and Iran – Syria’s main backers – will allow those talks to make any progress.
A list of 34 members of a secretariat designated to select the opposition’s negotiating team contained 11 representatives of rebel fighting groups, nine members of the exiled political opposition, six from Syria’s internal opposition and eight independents.
“There’s a big difference between militants, terrorists and opposition”, Assad said.
The Syrian government refers to all insurgent groups as terrorists.
Key Syrian Kurdish groups that have been instrumental in the fight against Islamic State were excluded from the Riyadh conference in a controversial move that prompted some Arab delegates to stay away too.
Kerry, however, said he is confident those issues will be resolved.
Samih Shubayb in the Palestinian paper Al-Ayyam believes the “mosaic of groups” are uniting for the “post-Islamic-State era in Syria”.
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Given its longstanding opposition to Assad, Saudi Arabia s hosting of the talks came under fire, with Tehran saying the meeting was in breach of declarations made in the global peace talks. “So we would very much view them as being part of this consensus agreement”, Kirby said.
