Syria’s main opposition group met UN mediator Staffan de Mistura for the first time yesterday, but the talks ran straight into trouble after Islamic State (IS) bombers killed more than 60 people near the country’s main Shia shrine.
Representatives of the Higher Negotiation Committee (HNC)  warned they may yet walk away from the Geneva talks unless the suffering of civilians in the five-year conflict is eased.
The UN is aiming for six months of negotiations, first seeking a ceasefire, later working toward a political settlement to the civil war that has also killed over 250,000 people, driven more than 10mn from their homes and drawn in global powers.
Only on Friday, the HNC said it would boycott the process, insisting it wanted an end to air strikes and sieges of Syrian towns before joining the negotiations. This forced de Mistura - who invited the government and opposition umbrella group for “proximity talks”, in which he would meet each side in separate rooms - to set the ball rolling with
only the government delegation.
The HNC later relented and arrived in Geneva on Saturday. However, the group questioned how long the delegation would stay.
“In view of the (Syrian) regime and its allies’ insistence in violating the rights of the Syrian people, the presence of the HNC delegation in Geneva would not have any justification and the HNC could pull its negotiating team out,” the group’s co-ordinator, Riad Hijab, said in an online statement.
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon described the talks - the first in two years - as long overdue. “I urge all parties to put the people of Syria at the heart of their discussions, and above partisan interests,” he said on a visit to Ethiopia.
A spokeswoman for de Mistura said the UN mediator had met the opposition delegation at its hotel, while his deputy Ramzi Ezzedine Ramzi visited the government delegates at theirs. The talks will continue today.
In Washington, US Secretary of State John Kerry urged both sides to seize the opportunity to make progress. “In the end there is no military solution to the conflict,” he said in a televised statement.
However, opposition delegate Bassma Kodmani denied that her side was ready yet to negotiate. “We only came to Geneva after receiving assurances and commitments ... that there would be serious progress on the humanitarian situation,” she told a news conference. “We can’t start political negotiations until we have those gestures.”
The Syrian government’s delegation head in Geneva, Bashar al-Jaafari, said the government was considering moves such as the creation of humanitarian corridors, ceasefires and prisoner releases, but suggested they might come about as a result of the talks, not before them.