Riyadh: Syria's largest mainstream opposition group said Friday it would attend UN-brokered peace talks in Geneva, a senior delegate told AFP after four days of discussions in Riyadh.
The delegate said the Saudi-backed High Negotiations Committee (HNC) will send "about 30, 35 people" in all to the UN-brokered Geneva talks, which got underway Friday.
The HNC however said it would not be taking part in peace negotiations in the Swiss city.
"HNC confirms it is coming to #Genevaiii to participate in discussions with the @UN, not for negotiations," the group said in a tweet.
It's a new move for the opposition group as the UN-led push to chart a way out of Syria’s tangled civil war got off to a shaky start Friday, with only representatives of Bashar Al Assad’s regime attending the first day of supposed "Geneva III" peace talks in Switzerland.
The main umbrella body representing the myriad opposition and rebel groups in the five-year-old conflict earlier refused to take part at the start of what are meant to be six months of intra-Syrian negotiations in Geneva.
A member of this group, told AFP however that a small, low-level team of three spokesmen were en route for Geneva where they might meet with UN special envoy to Syria Steffan de Mistura.
“The media delegation... might meet with de Mistura, with the Americans, but the programme is not clear yet,” Fouad Aliko said. “But not as negotiators.”
Neither de Mistura nor Syria’s UN ambassador Bashar Al Jaafari commented to reporters as they began discussions inside Geneva’s Palais des Nations, the European UN headquarters.
Biggest push
The talks, backed by all the external powers embroiled in the war, are the biggest push yet to end a conflict that has killed more than 260,000 people and facilitated the meteoric rise of the extremist Islamic State (IS) group.
The highly complex conflict, which has been raging for almost five years, has also destabilised the already restive Middle East and drawn in not only regional powers like Saudi Arabia, Iran and Turkey but also the United States and Russia.
It has also forced millions of Syrians from their homes, many of them into neighbouring states and further afield, causing a major political headache for the European Union which received more than one million migrants in 2015.
De Mistura issued an emotional video message on Thursday to Syrians both inside and outside the country saying that after previous failures, this new effort “cannot fail”.
