The United Nations led fresh efforts Thursday to jump-start Syrian peace talks that Western countries and the opposition fear are being undermined by a separate Russian diplomatic push. The two days of talks in Vienna come after eight previous rounds in Geneva during which the two sides failed to even meet each other - and these negotiations appeared likely to be no different. Syrian regime officials held around two hours of talks with UN special envoy Staffan de Mistura at the world body's Vienna offices, before the opposition Syrian Negotiations Commission (SNC) arrived for separate talks.
"We are committed to a free Syria, to a democratic one, to a country safe for its people to go back home," SNC spokesman Yahya al-Aridi told reporters. Previous talks have stumbled in particular over the fate of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, with the government delegation refusing to meet the opposition face to face until they drop demands that he leaves office.
Aridi described the talks as "crucial", echoing De Mistura who said on Wednesday that the negotiations came at a "very, very critical moment". The brutal Syrian war, which has claimed more than 340,000 lives since 2011, has grown even more complex over the past week with Turkey launching a ground operation against Kurdish fighters in northern Afrin. That has heightened tensions with Turkey's Western allies - particularly the US, which has backed the Kurdish YPG in their fight against the Islamic State group - with Germany calling for NATO to hold talks over Ankara's operation "Olive Branch".
French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian on Wednesday called the Vienna talks the "last hope" for reaching a political solution, raising worries over a "considerable worsening of the humanitarian situation" in Afrin, Idlib and Eastern Ghouta. The Vienna talks come ahead of a separate peace conference next Tuesday in the Russian Black Sea resort of Sochi, backed by Russia, Iran and Turkey. Some 1,600 people have been invited to the talks aimed at agreeing a post-war constitution, the Kremlin said Thursday.
The SNC, Syria's main opposition group, has yet to say whether it will attend, with dozens of rebel factions already ruling it out. Key regional players Russia, Turkey and Iran have been sponsoring parallel peace talks since the start of last year, which have fuelled concerns that the Kremlin is looking to sideline the UN. "The Russians have done everything to weaken the Geneva process. They want to short-circuit it and be the only sponsor of the diplomatic process," said Hasni Abidi from the CERMAM think-tank in Geneva. A Western diplomatic source said that if Moscow wanted its own peace talks in Sochi to be successful, it must push its ally Assad into accepting the need for a political transition, as agreed by the UN Security Council in 2015.
"This is the moment for the Russians to be banging their fists on the table," the source told AFP. "The opposition has no reason to go to Sochi if the Russians don't win any commitments from Damascus."