Syria’s Opposition Unveils Peace Plan
Syria’s main government opposition issued a road map on Wednesday for a transition to a democratic state without President Bashar al-Assad, as officials from the U.S., European Union and regional powers gathered for talks in London on possible ways out of the conflict.
The proposal by the opposition High Negotiations Committee comes amid faltering efforts by the U.S. and Russia on a deal to curb the fighting in Syria, now in its sixth year. The conflict has cost the lives of some 400,000 Syrians and forced another 11 million to flee their homes.
U.S. President Barack Obama and Russian leader Vladimir Putin failed during talks Monday in China to reach agreement on a cease-fire for the delivery of humanitarian aid. Mr. Obama told reporters afterward that Moscow and Washington “haven’t yet closed the gaps in a way we think it would actually work.”
A White House official described the final differences between the U.S. and Russia on a Syria deal as “technical” and related to implementation of the proposed agreement.
U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter on Wednesday put the blame for the delay in reaching an deal directly on Moscow, which won’t be represented at the meeting of the so-called Friends of Syria in the British capital.
Mr. Carter told students at the University of Oxford in the U.K. that U.S. diplomats were testing whether Russia would prove willing and able to influence the Syrian government toward a political transition to end the country’s civil war.
“Today’s news out of Syria is not encouraging,” Mr. Carter said. “The choice is Russia’s to make, and the consequences will be its responsibility.”
The proposal unveiled by the Syrian opposition on Wednesday calls for a six-month negotiation between the opposition and the government, followed by an 18-month period to set up a transitional government with full executive powers to write a new constitution and the departure of Mr. Assad and his “clique.”
The third and final stage involves implementation of the constitution with local, legislative, and presidential elections.
“This is a vision for all the Syrians and for Syria,” Riyad Hijab, the coordinator of the HNC and former prime minister of Syria, told reporters in introducing the plan.
“We want to rid ourselves of extremism and terrorism. We want to move from the state of dictatorship, corruption, and a police state that destroyed the Syrian country and has caused a lot of problems for the region and threatens the security of the world,” Mr. Hijab said.
In Damascus, there was no immediate response to the plan from the Syrian government.
The opposition’s plan, much of it echoing a United Nations-sponsored peace plan centered on talks in Geneva, comes ahead of a meeting of foreign ministers and officials of the Friends of Syria, which includes the U.S. and Britain, which has pushed unsuccessfully for an end to the violence and for Mr. Assad to step down.
Representatives of Syria’s government and opposition last held proximity talks in Geneva in late April. Those negotiations collapsed when the Syrian government and its Russian allies stepped up attacks in the northeastern province of Aleppo.
Twice in the past three months, Staffan de Mistura, the U.N. special envoy for Syria, has expressed his hopes for a resumption of negotiations in Geneva within weeks, only to have the deadlines pass.
In a column published in The Times on Wednesday, U.K. Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson called the HNC proposal “the first credible picture of Syria without Assad” and said it answered to Russian concerns about what might follow the Syrian president’s exit. He reiterated that the Syrian president could have no part in the future government of Syria.
“There is still a chance that this vision can be made to work. If the Russians and Americans can together create a cease-fire, then the talks can restart in Geneva with the difference, perhaps, that all sides will by then have seen at least the scaffolding of a post-Assad Syria,” Mr. Johnson said.
Fighting in the complex, multi-front war continued Tuesday. One person was killed and another 70 wounded in a barrel-bomb attack in a rebel-held areas of Aleppo city.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a U.K.-based opposition monitoring group, said local doctors suspected the barrels bombs contained chlorine.
Also on Tuesday, three Turkish soldiers died and three others were wounded when a Turkish tank unit and their Syrian rebel allies clashed with an Islamic State cell, according to a statement by the military.
The fighting occurred in Aleppo province where Turks and local Syrian rebels have established a buffer zone along the 90-kilometer border between Syria and Turkey from where Islamic State has been able to resupply itself with foreign fighters and export its terror threat to the wider world.
The Turks, supported by approximately 1,000 Syrian Arab and Turkmen fighters, successfully seized the belt of territory after a 12-day military campaign called Operation Euphrates Shield that started on Aug. 24.
That force is mopping up remaining Islamic State units and preparing to take the town of Al Bab, where Turkish and U.S. officials believe sympathizers of the Sunni Muslim extremist group have retreated.