Asia

Home page

Asia

Joint envoy for Syria to meet with top American, Russian officials: UN spokesman

01 February 2013 22:03 (UTC +04:00)

Baku-APA. The international envoy for Syria, Lakhdar Brahimi, is scheduled to meet with high-ranking U.S. and Russian officials Saturday on the sidelines of a security conference in Munich, Germany, which has attracted some 500 experts and officials from around the world to discuss security issues related to Syria, Mali and Iran, a UN spokesman told reporters here Friday, APA reports quoting Xinhua.

Brahimi, who has been engaged in good offices and mediation on Syria on behalf of the UN and the Arab League, is expected to " have bilateral meetings" with U.S. Vice President Joseph Biden and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, said the deputy UN spokesman, Eduardo del Buey, at a daily news briefing here.

Brahimi, the former Algerian foreign minister appointed to mediate a political solution to the longstanding Syrian crisis, " will meet this evening with (Sheikh) Moaz al-Khatib, a leader of the Syrian opposition, on the margins of a security conference in Munich," del Buey said.

Al-Khatib is the president of the National Coalition of Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces.

French Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian and Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi are also expected to attend the Munich conference, the three-day event which opened Friday.

"The appalling violence in Syria and Iran's nuclear program are topics that will be of critical importance over the next months, and maybe years," said Wolfgang Ischinger, chairman of the Munich Security Conference.

The Syrian crisis broke out in March 2011 and the subsequent violence spilled over the region, leading to a massive influx of Syrian refugees into neighboring countries.

"Meanwhile, the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) has this week completed a first delivery of winter emergency relief to the Azzas area of northern Syria, where thousands of internally displaced people are living in makeshift camps," del Buey said, referring to urgently-needed UN relief aid reaching the northern Syria for the first time.

"Two hundred metric tons of tents and blankets were airlifted last weekend from the (UN) Agency's central warehouse in Copenhagen to a civilian airport near Latakia on the Syrian coast, " he said. "From there, it was transported by road in an eight- truck convoy to an area between Aleppo and the Syrian-Turkish border."