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Syria peace talks set for January 22 in Geneva

26 November 2013 03:45 (UTC +04:00)

Baku-APA. An international peace conference for Syria will begin on January 22, the first direct talks between President Bashar al-Assad's government and rebels seeking to overthrow him, the United Nations said on Monday, APA reports quoting Reuters.

Ban Ki-moon, the U.N. secretary-general, said the goal was to agree on a mutually acceptable transitional administration as well as the other elements of an outline peace plan drafted by the Western powers and Russia at Geneva in June last year.

"It is a huge opportunity for peace that shouldn't be wasted," Lakhdar Brahimi, Ban's special envoy for Syria, told a news conference in the Swiss city, where the long delayed face-to-face talks should take place in eight weeks.

Syrians and diplomats have few illusions about how hard it will be to end a civil war that has killed over 100,000 people since 2011, driven over a third of the population from their homes and divided the country among rival and often religiously driven factions with an array of competing foreign sponsors.

But a day after Assad's regional ally Iran cut a deal on its nuclear program with the United States and other world powers to ease fears of a wider war in the Middle East, U.N. officials spoke of a chance to start staunching the bloodshed.

It remained unclear whether Iran would attend - nor is it clear who will represent the divided Syrian opposition - although U.S. officials raised doubts about Tehran's participation.

"There are many challenges ahead and no one should underestimate the difficulties," said a spokesman for U.S. President Barack Obama as he welcomed a date for the talks.

"The United States has long made clear that there is no military solution to the violence in Syria," he added.

Russia, a vital supplier to Syria, which has shielded Assad from Western demands for U.N. sanctions and from rebel demands that he step down before negotiations can start, again blamed the opposition for holding up the peace conference.

"It could have been held much earlier if the opposition had felt responsibility for its country and had not put forward preconditions when we met in September, October, November," Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov was quoted as saying by state-run Russian news agency RIA.