The terrorist attacks in Brussels for which Islamic State has claimed responsibility have placed a duty on negotiators to find a political solution and extinguish the fires of the Syrian civil war, the UN special envoy Staffan de Mistura has said, after a further round of talks produced no detectable breakthrough. De Mistura urged all sides at the talks to keep in mind the horrors of Istanbul and Brussels – a city he described as the moral capital of Europe.
Speaking in Geneva, he claimed that the Brussels attacks showed “there was no time to lose”, as he tried to lever the two sides closer to one another. He insisted that the lack of a visible agreed agenda, and the accusatory public statements of both delegations, should not be taken as a true picture of the team’s private positions. He claimed that the atmosphere was better than at any previous round of negotiations.
De Mistura was speaking after a further round of talks on Tuesday with the high negotiations committee, the umbrella body for the opposition parties. “The message we are drawing out is that we need to end the fires of war,” he said. “We need to find a political solution in Syria to make sure we can all concentrate on what is the real danger for Europe, in the world and in Syria.” The opening round of talks is due to end on Thursday, and he said he hoped meetings in Moscow between the US secretary of state, John Kerry, and the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, starting on Tuesday, might give the talks some impetus.
De Mistura added: “We are looking with great interest, expectation and hope that the talks in Moscow will be productive – and honestly, not everything will be solved in one day – but productive in the right direction to help us to resume the talks with much more in-depth address on the issue of political transition.”
De Mistura is struggling to persuade the Syrian government delegation to engage with the issue of the shape of a political transition
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