The United Nations' special envoy for Syria, Staffan de Mistura, said on Wednesday that he hopes the re-initiation of peace talks between the mainstream Syrian opposition and the regime will bring the two sides closer to ending the five-year-old war in that country. The resumption of the talks, set to begin next Monday, comes after the success of the US-Russian brokered ceasefire which has held since February 27. These negotiations, de Mistura expects, will be more "substantive, deeper". From next Monday, March 14, until March 24, the regime, its Russian and Iranian backers, and the plethora of opposition groups under the umbrella of the Saudi-sponsored High Negotiations Committee (HNC) will discuss the next course of action to take to end the conflict. Then there will be a recess period as de Mistura and his UN team determine where they are and how close they are to achieving their goals. That recess would be for a "few days, a week, perhaps 10 days, in order to give the time to delegations to then return and for us to recap where we are on it - and then resume them, as we did in the past," de Mistura said to reporters in Geneva according to AP. "We believe that having a timetable and a time limit is healthy for everyone, so we don't think that we can go no procedural discussions for two weeks hoping to get into substance, we go seriously into substance as soon as we can," he said. On Monday the introduction of a new constitution for Syria as well as the holding of parliamentary and presidential elections will be discussed. de Mustra did not say whether the incumbent President Bashar al-Assad will step-down as part of a transition process anytime soon, a key demand of the opposition.
