Beirut: Three lists of have been drawn up by different stakeholders in the Syria War. They include a total of 80 names earmarked to take part in the upcoming talks between the Syrian government and opposition next December.
The American list includes 15 names, which does not include any PKK-affiliated Syrian Kurds or members of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood. This is ostensibly to appease Turkey and Egypt respectively.
It has a wide variety of figures with different political leanings, which breaks the three-year monopoly of the Syrian National Coalition, who were previously earmarked as the sole representatives of the Syrian opposition.
Among those included on the American list are current president of the SNC, Khalid Al Khoja and his vice president Nagam Al Ghadry. Also on the list are his two predecessors, Hadi Al Bahra and Abdul Bassit Sida.
This includes business community representatives and notables like the Scotland-based oil tycoon Ayman Asfari and the Dubai-based millionaire and entrepreneur Abdul Kader Al Sankari.
The list singles out members of large political families that led Syria before the Baathist coup of 1963 like Adib Al Shishakli, the grandson of former president Adib Al Shishakli, who currently serves as the Syrian opposition ambassador to the GCC.
Other names include Lama Al Atasi, a scion of a leading political family in the central city of Homs who now serves as spokesperson for the Free Syrian Army (FSA) and Fida Al Hawrani, the daughter of Akram Al Hawrani, the ‘godfather’ of Syrian socialism and an early member of the Baath party who served as parliament speaker in the 1950’s and vice president to Jamal Abdul Nasser from 1958-1961.
The list also includes civil society leaders like Reem Turkmani and writer Michel Kilo; it also includes two preachers from Damascus, Mu’ath Al Khatib and Usama Al Rifai.
The Arab list has a 25 names and is topped by ex-vice president Farouk Al Shara, who was relieved of his duties in the summer of 2014. During his long years at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Al Shara cultivated many friendships in the GCC, prompting the Arab League to single him out as an ‘acceptable negotiator’ with the opposition back in 2011-2012.
Others on the Arab list include Adel Safar, who served as prime minister in 2011-2012 and still resides in Damascus. He was put on the list as an ‘acceptable’ Baathist and not as a representative of the Syrian opposition.
Safar’s successor, former agriculture minister Riad Hijab is on the list, who defected from the government in 2012. Ex-deputy minister of economic affairs, Abdullah Dardari and Qadri Jamil, a ranking communist who currently resides in Moscow are also on the list.
Salim Idriss the ex-commander of the Free Syrian Army and Abdul Elah Al Bashir, former chief-of-staff for the Supreme Military Council of the FSA are included.
The Russian list repeats names of both former lists and all those who had attended the Syria talks in Moscow earlier this year. In addition to most of the names, it includes Farouk Tayfour of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, and Kurdish politician Saleh Muslim and the Moscow-backed Hassan Abdul Azim of the National Coordination Committee and Louai Hussain of the State Building Movement, who until 2015, was based in Syria.
-Sami Moubayed is a Syrian historian and former Carnegie scholar. He is also author of “Under the Black Flag: At the frontier of the New Jihad”
