“This is the widest participation for the opposition, inside and outside of Syria, and we have the participation of the armed groups, ” said Hadi al-Bahra, a member of the exiled Syrian National Coalition who attended the two-day conference that produced the new body. While portrayed as a political opposition, these elements represent nothing outside of their own mercenary ambitions and the imperialist powers and right-wing Sunni Arab regimes that fund them.
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Egypt’s Foreign Ministry has praised the outcome of Riyadh meeting, which grouped a vast range of Syria’s opposition groups.
Sources inside the talks and Western diplomats said Ahrar al-Sham subsequently signed up to the opposition agreement, but this could not be immediately confirmed.
The meeting of Syrian opposition groups in Saudi Arabia last week was neither an unqualified success nor, as some claim, a “fiasco”.
Secretary of State John Kerry at a press conference on December 4, 2015.
The opposition was willing to enter talks with Syrian government representatives and to accept a Un supervised ceasefire, the statement added.
Both Russia and Iran have rejected the ouster of Assad as the precondition for talks, taking the position that his fate should be decided by the Syrian people.
“The aim of the political settlement is to create a state based on the principle of citizenship without Bashar al-Assad or figures of his regime having a place in it or any future political arrangements”, the groups said Thursday in a statement. Also in attendance were representatives of the Syria-based National Coordination Body, an organization sometimes accused by other opposition members of being too conciliatory toward Assad’s government, although several of its senior members are in prison.
The Syrian leader said “we are ready to start negotiations with the opposition… and the opposition for any person in the world does not mean armed” groups.
Whether the Syrian president stays in power is considered a key element to finding peace amid the country’s nearly 5-year-old civil war, and toward clearing the way for a stepped-up fight against the Islamic State group.
The Vienna process envisages formal talks between the Syrian government and the opposition by January.
Syrian President Bashar Assad, in an exclusive interview with EFE, stressed the need to halt the flow of terrorists that he said were arriving in Syria and Iraq through Turkey, as well as to block the terror financing that, in his view, was originating in Saudi Arabia.
“I never thought about leaving Syria under any circumstances, in any situation, something I never put in my mind”, he said when asked if he would step down as part of a political solution. On Thursday, Deputy Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian said some groups linked to the Islamic State militant group were involved in the Riyadh meeting.
Since it began in March 2011, Syria s conflict has left more than 250,000 dead and forced millions from their homes.
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Retired U.S. Army Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, the former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, has termed Obama’s choice of aiding the jihadists a “willful decision”, even in the face of DIA warnings about the likely rise of the Islamic State and other extremists.
