With their positions on Syria seeming to be moving closer together, the United States and Russia are set to hold another round of diplomatic talks this week aimed at ending the Syrian civil war.
Friday’s meeting of the International Syria Support Group (ISSG), the third in six weeks, seeks to put in place a peace plan reached by ministers last month in Vienna under the umbrella of the United Nations.
Senior State Department officials tell CNN that Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov are leading negotiations among nations meeting in New York Friday on the text of the UN Security Council resolution on Syria. They are fine tuning the text and hope to vote this afternoon.
The resolution does three things, which internationalize efforts to seek a political solution in Syria. It endorses the 17-member ISSG as the main body dealing with the Syria peace process; validates the peace plan agreed to by the ISSG in Vienna last month, including a cease-fire between the regime and opposition in six months and talks leading to drafting a new constitution; and gives the U.N. a leading role in working with the regime and opposition on negotiating a ceasefire and drafting a constitution, which officials said is aimed at giving an international stamp on the peace process.
Diplomats close to the talks said Friday that there is heated discussion among the nations in the meeting about the list of groups that will be considered terrorist groups and unable to take part in talks.
But they said it was unlikely to affect passage of a U.N. resolution giving international endorsement of the peace process.
“The consensus is that they won’t reach consensus on the terrorist list today,” one of the diplomats said.
Spurred on by the deadly attacks in Paris, the 17 nations overcame their differences on how to end the civil war in Syria and agreed to the roadmap for a political transition now being worked on.
The U.S. and Russia have long split on the best path forward in Syria. The U.S. supports groups warring with President Bashar al-Assad, a close Kremlin ally. Moscow, meanwhile, has been bolstering Assad with airstrikes ostensibly aimed at ISIS but more often, according to the Pentagon, targeting other opposition fighters, including ones support by Washington.
Not only have Russian military strikes had a minimal effect on ISIS, being mostly focused elsewhere, they have also exacerbated an already dire humanitarian crisis.
But an increasingly bloodied Russia — now a target of ISIS — and growing U.S. urgency in resolving the five-year-old conflict whose chaos only strengthens the terror group, seems to provide some common ground for finding a resolution to the conflict.
After holding marathon meetings in Moscow with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Lavrov, Kerry said the U.S. and Russia hoped to enshrine the agreed-upon road map for an end to the civil war in a U.N. Security Council Resolution.
The U.S. hopes a cease-fire between the regime and Syrian rebels would allow Russia, along with the U.S.-led coalition of Arab and Western allies, to focus on fighting the jihadists.
“You can’t defeat Daesh without also de-escalating the fight in Syria,” Kerry said in Moscow, using another name for ISIS.
State Department Spokesman John Kirby said Friday’s meeting seeks to “better define” what a political transition in Syria would look like and how a cease-fire could be implemented and monitored.
Still undecided is which rebel groups should be part of the negotiations between the regime and the opposition, expected to start in early January.
Friday’s talks follow a meeting last week in Saudi Arabia in which Syrian opposition groups agreed to unite to negotiate with the regime on a cease-fire. The Kremlin has rejected the results of the meeting in Riyadh, saying it considered some of the rebels present terrorists.
The question of whether Assad could take part in the political transition continues to be a main sticking point. For the past four years, the U.S. has sided with Gulf States in calling for Assad’s ouster.
But this week in Moscow, Kerry raised eyebrows when he said “the United States and our partners are not seeking so-called ‘regime change,’ as it is known in Syria.”
Some viewed Kerry’s statement as an effort to placate his Russian hosts. Kerry did add that the U.S. still did not believe Assad “has the ability to be able to lead the future Syria,” and soon after his remarks, the State Department said the U.S. policy that Assad should go remained unchanged.
Russia, for its part, is now agreeing to the drafting of a new constitution and new elections, a position that has evolved over the last few months.
But Fred Hof, a former top U.S. diplomat handling Syria now at the Atlantic Council, warned that regardless of Assad’s fate, until Russia and Iran are willing to press him to stop bombing the Syrian people, there is little hope the political process will yield any results and that the bloodshed will end.
“Stopping the mass murder is a good place to start,” he said. “How the hell do you sit down for a peace process featuring compromise when one of the parties doesn’t accept the rules of the game and the other party’s constituency is being blown away on a daily basis?”
He continued, “The first symptom of Assad being under control would be an end to the collective punishment and mass homicide and only then would the Syrian people truly have a chance to decide their fate.”
