Damascus has ruled out talks with a bulk of the opposition forces battling to overthrow the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria, excluding among others the Western-backed Syrian National Coalition (SNC) and calling into question the viability of peace talks scheduled to take place between various factions in November.
“Assad is precluding almost all interlocutors with these sweeping preconditions,” Joshua Landis, director of the Center for Middle East Studies at Oklahoma University, tells The Cable. “He has named the select groups that he believes are the appropriate opposition, which are seen to be stooges of his government by much of the opposition.”
Speaking to Italian press, Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad said he would not negotiate with Al Qaeda-linked opposition elements, and Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Moallem ruled out talks with the SNC on the basis of the group’s support for Western strikes on Syria. The statement was not the first time that Damascus has sought to exclude opponents based on their expressions of opposition, a standard that some have suggested may permanently stymie diplomacy. Earlier this year Syria’s Foreign Ministry lashed out at the U.N.’s Middle East peace envoy for “flagrant bias” after Lakhdar Brahimi told a BBC interviewer that Assad was resisting the aspirations of the Syrian people.
Thursday’s statement from the foreign ministry expressed Syria’s “astonishment” at Brahimi’s quotes and said he “blatantly showed bias toward sides known for conspiring against Syria and the Syrian people.”
Russian officials today publicly suggested that the troubled talks would not take place as scheduled, and accused the West for being unable to deliver opposition forces to the table.
“Until recently we hoped our Western partners, who undertook to bring the opposition to the conference, could do it quite quickly, but they were unable to do it quickly, and I don’t know whether they will be able to do so by mid-November,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said.
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