Astana talks start with lack of organization among opposition groups
The host country of Kazakhstan’s deputy minister of foreign affairs, Roman Vassilenko, spoke late Saturday night about the format of the talks, which were announced late last month, and commenced Monday morning.
"The question is under discussion, it will be clear closer to the beginning of the meeting," the Russian TASS news agency reported that Vassilenko said. "As for extending the meeting, it depends on the outcome of the negotiations. We are ready to support the process.”
Representatives from Russia, Turkey and Iran met for more than five hours on Sunday, and Vassilenko added that the heads of all delegations taking part in efforts to bring peace to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s nearly six-year-long civil had all arrived in Astana.
Vassilenko argued that the “representatives of about 15 different groupings” of opposition groups lack a united spokesperson and message.
"The delegation includes several groups; there is no head of delegation in general. Each group has its own position," he said.
Yahya al-Aridi is spokesman for the opposition High Negotiations Committee (HNC), which was founded in December 2015 at a conference held in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, to represent the Syrian opposition in the failed Geneva peace talks in 2016.
Whether Russia and Turkey will manage to bolster the ceasefire they brokered on Dec. 30 will be a key measure of success for the Astana meetings, the Associated Press (AP) reported Aridi as saying.
The opposition is made up of about a dozen rebel figures led by Mohammad Alloush of the Army of Islam group, the AP reported from Astana.
Alloush had been the HNC’s spokesman at previous peace talks in Geneva, but resigned the position in May 2016 saying that without any of the opposition demands met, peace talks were a "waste of time."
For their part, Kurds, who control large swaths of territory in northern Syria, have a fractured attendance at the Astana talks. Ankara extended an invitation to the head of the Kurdish National Council (KNC, ENKS), the deputy president of the Syrian National Council and a consultant.
Ankara, however, has opposed the participation of the Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD). The Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), the coalition of forces currently fighting ISIS in Raqqa Province, has also been left out of the Astana talks, which are aimed at resolving the civil war and not the fight against ISIS.
The lack of ministry-level negotiators coordinating will result in the Astana talks being an “essentially technocratic gathering,” Deutsche Welle wrote last week.
The Syrian Center for Policy Research reported in February 2016 that 11.5-percent of Syrians have been killed or wounded since the conflict began in 2011, and 470,000 people have died, directly or indirectly.