It is depressing that the fourth round of Geneva dialogue on Syria began with a last-minute round of discussions on the talks. But at least the majority of the opposition were in the room, as the convener of the talks, United Nations Special Envoy to Syria, Staffan de Mistura, had insisted that in addition to the mainstream Saudi-based High Negotiations Committee, an umbrella group of armed and political factions, two other groups were invited who had attended the Moscow and the Cairo rounds of talks.
The professionally optimistic De Mistura said that the latest round of peace talks would be “a serious try” to find peace, but he was realistic enough to caution against talking about a breakthrough in attempts to end the six-year civil war, while also making a passionate plea to the Syrian factions to try and find a way out of the endless slaughter. “It is your opportunity and solemn responsibility,” he said, “not to condemn future generations of Syrian children to long years of bitter and bloody conflict.”
But the optimism lingering from the previous round of talks in February 2016 has vanished. One year ago, there was hope that the Russians would be able to persuade Syrian President Bashar Al Assad to be conciliatory, but today the regime feels that it is able to win the war and does not really need the talks, and it has watched the rebel groups collapse into a confused welter of internal splits and mergers with no clear political expectations.
A military option is that the United States and Russia can walk away from the talks and let the regime with its Iranian and Russian allies achieve total defeat of the opposition, before joining the coalition against Daesh (the self-proclaimed Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant).
But such a plan is deeply flawed by its political failings, and De Mistura, the western community, and Arab states argue that such a crushing of the opposition would only create a new round of fighting in the future. They also add that Al Assad’s repeated bombings and use of chemical weapons against Syrian civilians, and gross abuses in his prisons, make his indefinite retention of power hard to contemplate, never mind that such an outcome would also leave Iran entrenched in Syria, which is something that US President Donald Trump would be loath to contemplate, along with much of the Arab world.
