The Syrian opposition will assess at the end of this week whether to continue indirect peace talks with a Syrian government that it says is so far refusing to engage in detailed negotiations and instead continuing to starve Syrians into submission, its chief negotiator has said.
Mohammed Alloush, the leader of the Syrian opposition delegation at the peace talks, suggested in a joint interview with the Guardian, Le Monde and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung that little progress has been made in the first week of negotiations and many pitfalls lie ahead.
Staffan de Mistura, the UN Syrian special envoy, is due to pause the talks on Thursday but is struggling to persuade the Syrian government to engage in detailed discussions about plans for a transitional body to run Syria over the next 18 months and the role of Bashar al-Assad in such a government.
De Mistura is shuttling between the two main delegations in search of common ground but has admitted there are large gaps. Alloush said the opposition could not accept the Syrian president as part of the transitional body and added that “those with blood on their hands can have no part in a reconstituted Syrian army”.
The new transitional body, he said, should have the powers of the president, the government, parliament and the courts. He added that those charged with war crimes should be dealt with by Syrian courts and not the International Criminal Court, arguing the ICC has a backlog of 30,000 cases that would delay justice.
Alloush, a political figure in the Jaysh al-Islam (Islam Army) rebel group, is the senior negotiator for High Negotiations Committee (HNC), the official Syrian opposition delegation at the Geneva peace talks.
He is probably the single most important figure in the opposition and through his connections with Jaysh al-Islam, which Damascus and Moscow consider a terrorist group, has credibility with some fighters on the ground.
Alloush said his team will decide whether to continue with the talks at the end of the week. “We can then assess all the answers and assess the round of talks in general and the whole world can then see clearly who is procrastinating and who is putting obstacles in the way.”
He said so far the Syrian government had only put forward a very general paper of eight principles that was not relevant to the task of forming a transitional government.
By contrast, he said his team had put forward detailed papers covering justice, security and political transition. “We are ready to answer all questions in detail put to us by the UN. The UN has said our paper is detailed, positive and moderate. The government paper is simply not relevant to what we have come to discuss.”
John Kerry, the US secretary of state, is due to meet Vladimir Putin for talks in Moscow this week that will include Syria. Alloush said “America had a moral duty to increase the pressure” and, in particular, needed to intervene to persuade Russia to require Assad to negotiate seriously, including by ending the use of starvation sieges to force Syrians to abandon the resistance. He also warned European leaders to be more involved in the talks. “More refugees [are] heading to Europe. The international community has to tackle the root cause of this problem. We cannot just deal with symptoms. The root cause is the one person who has forced millions and millions to leave their homes.
“Take Bashar al-Assad and 1,000 criminals then Syria could take back the refugees. That would be the logical and just solution for this problem. The international community is capable of doing this. More financial measures is not the answer.”
In a further sign of problems ahead for De Mistura, Alloush showed hostility to the idea of the Syrian Kurdish YPG being represented at the talks, describing them as “followers of the Assad regime”. The YPG has been excluded from the talks, partly due to Turkish protests, and the HNC has other Kurds on its delegation.
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