Islamic State bombers have killed more than 60 people near Syria’s holiest Shia shrine in Damascus as the country’s main opposition group met the UN mediator, Staffan de Mistura, for the first time.
Representatives of the Saudi-backed Higher Negotiation Committee (HNC) – which includes political and militant opponents of President Bashar al-Assad – warned they may yet walk away from the Geneva talks unless the suffering of civilians in the five-year conflict was eased.
The head of the Syrian government delegation said that the blasts in Damascus, which the interior ministry blamed on a car bomb and two suicide bombers, merely confirmed the opposition’s terrorist links – even though Isis has been excluded from the talks.
The United Nations is aiming for six months of negotiations, with an initial ceasefire working toward a political settlement to the civil war that has killed more than 250,000 people, driven over 10 million from their homes and drawn in global powers.
Only on Friday, the HNC said it would boycott the process, insisting it wanted an end to airstrikes and sieges of Syrian towns before joining the negotiations. This forced de Mistura – who invited the government and opposition umbrella group for “proximity talks” in which he would meet each side in separate rooms – to set the ball rolling with only the Damascus delegation.
Under intense pressure, notably from the US, the HNC later relented and arrived in Geneva on Saturday. However, the group questioned how long the delegation would stay.
“In view of the [Syrian] regime and its allies’ insistence in violating the rights of the Syrian people, the presence of the HNC delegation in Geneva would not have any justification and the HNC could pull its negotiating team out,” the group’s coordinator, Riad Hijab, said in an online statement.
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