Syria's main opposition delegation, the Saudi-backed High Negotiating Council (HNC), has said it will not be attending peace talks over the country's future on Friday in Geneva, Switzerland, Reuters reported on Thursday.
The council will apparently continue to deliberate in the coming days and weeks over whether it will attend at all — a development that is in line with Russia's strategy for winning the war on behalf of the regime.
"The bickering over the opposition delegation for Geneva III is the ideal opposition the Russians wish to present—leaderless, aimless and weak,"Antoun Issa, a senior editor at the Middle East Institute, wrote on Thursday.
He continued:
It all leads to the fulfillment of the regime's and Russia's strategy: a Syria divided between terrorist jihadists and the Assad regime. Such a portrayal leaves the West with no option but to legitimize the Assad regime in the fight against terror, and certify Russia as the primary power in Syria.
The delegation's decision to skip the talks comes after its final calls for Syria's government to end its aerial bombardments on civilians and lift its sieges on rebel-held areas went unheeded by the UN's Syria envoy, Staffan de Mistura.
De Mistura had insisted at a press conference on Monday that "our line ... is clear: no preconditions, at least to start the talks."
The HNC sent a letter to de Mistura and UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon reiterating its demands on Wednesday. It convened in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, to await clarification from de Mistura over whether its preconditions would be met before Friday.
"There is a problem we would like to clarify with de Mistura," Riyadh Naasan Agha, a member of the HNC, told ABC. "Is the main aim of these negotiations for them to be held or to succeed?"
For Syrian President Bashar Assad and his Russian and Iranian backers, "there is no peace short of victory," Issa, of the Middle East Institute, writes. In that sense, pro-government forces would benefit most from the talks being delayed indefinitely or derailed entirely.
That is increasingly becoming a reality. The UN, so far, has not reconsidered its position, and neither has the opposition.
"There must be a halt to the bombardment of civilians by Russian planes, and sieges of blockaded areas must be lifted" in order for conditions to be "appropriate" for meaningful negotiations, George Sabra, deputy head of the opposition delegation, told Reuters on Thursday.
The rebels claim that US Secretary of State John Kerry pressured them to attend the talks and threatened to cut off support to the rebels entirely if they did not show up in Geneva — a charge that Kerry has denied.
"The position of the United States is and hasn't changed. We are still supporting the opposition, politically, financially and militarily," he told reporters at a roundtable event on Tuesday.
Jaysh al-Islam, one of the largest groups in the HNC, was quick to point out that the rebels have other sources of support besides the US.
"We do not forget that there are sisterly states that support us and help us overcome these pressures, particularly Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey," the group's spokesman, Islam Alloush, told Reuters in an email.
Russia has been preparing for this impasse, however — and arguably helped to create it. In December, a Russian airstrike killed Zahran Alloush, leader of Jaysh al-Islam, in what experts say was part of a larger strategy employed by Russia and the regime to turn military victories into diplomatic leverage ahead of this week's negotiations.
"It's all part of the rules of engagement Russia wants to set up," Tony Badran, a Middle East expert and researcher at the Foundation for Defence of Democracies, told Business Insider in December.
He continued
Russia hits Jaysh al-Islam, forcing the group to decide between removing itself from the political process altogether — at which point it will be labeled a terrorist group — or coming to the table, emasculated, to talk to Assad. All while Russia reserves the right to strike the group.
Russia has reserved this right because Washington waffled in negotiating a definitive list of terrorist groups in Syria — a contentious process that Kerry delayed in order to ensure, ironically, that talks were not derailed before they began.
"Russia wants to establish a precedent to kiss a nationwide ceasefire goodbye," Badran said last month. "So it is putting pressure on these rebel groups to get them to say, 'The hell with this — if I'm going to get killed anyway, I'm not going to do it while negotiating with Assad.'"
Significantly, opposition sources told the daily pan-Arab newspaper Al Hayat that the US had made "a scary retreat" in its position that the rebels would be unable to accept — namely, that Assad could run for reelection and there would be no set timetable for his departure.
That stands in contrast to the White House's previous position that, while Assad does not have to go immediately, the timing of his departure should be addressed during negotiations.
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