Fouad Aliko will head the Kurdish delegation, a source told Rudaw. Hawass Agid and Abdulhakim Bashar from the KNC will also be present.
The KNC, comprised of about a dozen Kurdish parties and the main Kurdish Syrian opposition party in Syria, have attended the Geneva and Astana talks, but they do not have any real authority on the ground in northern Syria where the PYD has created Rojava administration, a self-autonomous region.
For the first time in what will be the fourth round of Syrian peace talks in Geneva, the opposition delegation will include ten military representatives and delegates, but none from the People’s Protection Units (YPG), the PYD’s armed wing.
The YPG is the primary force in the US-backed, multi-ethnic Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), whose recent scope has been fighting against ISIS.
“The PYD is a political leftist Marxist party; it does not possess a national agenda, but it calls for the building of a democratic state with all the community’s components, and the cradle of the party is the Kurdish people,” Aliko told the Syrian Observer in a 2015 interview. “Moreover, the PYD’s domination prevents them from cooperating with any party on ground — they need supporters to implement their agendas.”
The 21 opposition delegates, headed by Nasr al-Hariri, were selected during a meeting of the Syrian coalition in Riyadh, Saudia Arabia. Hariri formerly was a member of Syria’s legislative body, the People’s Council, but he resigned in protest of the killings of demonstrators during the initial 2011 protests in Syria.
Sources from the National Coalition for Syrian Revolution and Opposition Forces said Mohamed Sabra was chosen as a negotiator at Geneva which is planned for Feb. 20, Anadolu Agency reported. Sabra is a lawyer and contributor to the Syrian Center for Political & Strategic Studies. He participated in the third round of Geneva talks in 2016.
The UN Envoy to Syria Staffan de Mistura had previously indicated that he would select members of the opposition if they could not agree on their delegation.
