The UN envoy for Syria appealed to the US and Russia to intervene to help revive Syrian peace talks that sputtered to a pause on Wednesday, saying a recent spike in fighting has overshadowed the talks and put an increasingly feeble truce in “great danger.”
UN envoy for Syria Staffan de Mistura spoke to reporters early yesterday after briefing the UN Security Council via videoconference about the largely stalled indirect talks between the Western and Saudi-backed opposition and envoys from Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s government, which has the backing of Moscow.
After 60 days, he said, the cessation of hostilities agreed to by both sides “hangs by a thread.”
Photo: Reuters
“I really fear that the erosion of the cessation is unraveling the fragile consensus around a political solution, carefully built over the last year,” De Mistura said in his council briefing. “Now I see parties reverting to the language of a military solution or military option. We must ensure that they do not see that as a solution or an option.”
The current effort to end the five-year Syria conflict was largely spearheaded by US Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergey Lavrov, backed by major global and regional powers who formed the International Syria Support Group. It includes 17 countries, as well as the UN, Arab League, EU and Organization of Islamic Cooperation.
De Mistura appealed not only for US-Russia intervention, but for international support, calling in the UN Security Council briefing for another ministerial meeting of the International Syria Support Group “lest we lose the window of opportunity to reverse the negative downward spiral.”
He said that the talks may not survive unless the fighting subsides, and that will not happen “without some sort of political solution on the horizon.”
De Mistura said he hoped that the talks would resume next month, and he predicted the overall process would continue as previously planned through July, but he stopped short of setting a specific date, pointing to the recent upsurge in fighting, notably in and around Aleppo, Syria’s largest city before the war.
Lamenting the worsening violence, he said that “in the last 48 hours, we have had an average of one Syrian killed every 25 minutes, one Syrian wounded every 13 minutes ... How can you have substantial talks when you have only news about bombing and shelling?”
Speaking at the end of a third session of Syria peace talks this year, De Mistura said the truce brokered by the US and Russia had pulled off a “miracle” by sharply reducing violence in March, but acknowledged that the renewed fighting has put the cessation of hostilities “in great danger.”
He called for a “US-Russian initiative at the highest level” to help reinforce it.
“There is no reason that both of them — who have been putting so much political capital in that success story and have a common interest in not seeing Syria ending up in another cycle of war — should not be able to revitalize what they created, and which is still alive, but barely,” he said of the two countries.
US Department of State spokesman John Kirby said he shared De Mistura’s concerns about the increased violence jeopardizing the process and urged Russia to press the al-Assad regime “to fulfill its commitments.”
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