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U.S. says meeting for Syria cease-fire delayed, not canceled as Russia claims U.S., Russia hold Syria cease-fire talks as deadline passes without action
(about 5 hours later)
BEIRUT — Russia and the United States appeared at odds Friday about whether a meeting of the international coordinating group charged with implementing a cease-fire in Syria had been canceled, with Russia's Foreign Ministry claiming it was, and the U.S. and U.N. officials saying it was merely delayed. The deadline for a cease-fire in Syria’s civil war came and went Friday, as joint diplomatic and military teams from the United States and Russia tried to agree on rules covering where the shooting would stop and where it would be allowed to continue.
The back-and-forth Friday adds to delays in reducing hostilities and raises even more questions about the workability of the truce. The closed-door talks in Geneva were the first face-to-face meeting between high-level U.S. and Russian military officials over Syria since Russia began bombing there in the fall on behalf of President Bashar al-Assad.
The coordinating group was due to convene in Geneva on Friday, but Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said the meeting had been called off. Amid growing chaos on and around the northwest Syrian battlefield where myriad fighting forces­ have converged, an emergency meeting of the U.N. Security Council was convened in response to Russian demands to stop what it said were Turkey’s plans “to put boots on the ground” in the area.
“There was no group meeting today,” she said. She did not elaborate on why Russia believed the meeting would not take place. The cease-fire, initially set for Friday, was part of an agreement reached a week ago in Munich by the United States, Russia and other outside stakeholders in the Syrian conflict to stop a situation that appears to be rapidly spiraling out of control.
A U.S. official in Washington, however, speaking on condition of anonymity under government-imposed rules, said the meeting merely had “been delayed by a few hours, not canceled.” [A mini world war rages in the fields of Aleppo]
And a statement from the office of Staffan de Mistura, the U.N. envoy to Syria, seemed to back up the U.S. position, saying that the “preparatory meetings are still ongoing.” Secretary of State John F. Kerry expressed confidence that the Geneva talks were proceeding along the right track.
The statement added that the Office of the Special Envoy would “notify of the revised timing for the plenary meeting as soon as available.” “Everyone recognizes the complexity of this endeavor, and there is certainly a lot more work to do,” Kerry said in a statement. “These discussions have been serious and so far constructive, with a few tough issues still to resolve.”
If the meeting were to be canceled, it would signal another setback for international efforts to broker an end to a civil war that has killed 250,000 people, displaced millions and turned into a dangerous proxy conflict among world powers. Prospects for peace have diminished as Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s forces have made large gains near the strategic northern city of Aleppo with help from Iranian-backed militants and Russian airstrikes. Several proposals for a new cease-fire deadline — all centered on dates in the coming week — had been tabled, according to Obama administration officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry released a statement Friday afternoon addressing the addled state of the talks. The U.S. team, headed by senior White House adviser Robert Malley and State Department envoy Brett McGurk, included officers from the Pentagon’s Joint Staff, the Special Operations Command and the Central Command.
“I’ve been in touch with my team in Geneva. And they’ve been in near-constant discussions with the Russians,” Kerry said in the statement. “These discussions have been serious and so far constructive, with a few tough issues still to resolve.” The meeting marked a de facto suspension of the administration’s refusal to coordinate military actions in Syria outside of “deconfliction” talks to avoid an encounter between U.S. and Russian aircraft in increasingly crowded skies. The United States has been striking Islamic State targets in Syria since September 2014. For the past five months, Russia has been launching strikes against U.S.-supported opposition groups fighting against Assad.
Adding more confusion, the Reuters news agency reported from Geneva that U.S. and Russian military officials held an unannounced bilateral meeting Friday morning, aimed at narrowing positions between the two powers. Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter was said to have opposed the high-level contact with the Russians, at least initially. But Kerry and others in the administration argued that the subject matter demanded military expertise.
However, the same U.S. official who disputed the Russian contention that the coordinating group meeting had been canceled said there was no separate bilateral meeting between U.S. and Russian militaries. The cease-fire is called a “cessation of hostilities” in the Munich agreement among 17 nations that are supporting one side or the other in the Syrian civil war. In addition to the survival of the U.S.-backed Syrian opposition — under a barrage of Russian air attacks that have only increased since the cease-fire plan was signed — and hopes that an end to the fighting would facilitate talks about a political transition, the administration has been concerned about the safety of several dozen Special Operations troops deployed inside Syria as part of its separate fight against the Islamic State.
The international coordinating group — involving opponents of the Syrian leader, such as the United States, as well as his backers, Russia and Iran — agreed in Munich last week to hold discussions in Geneva over the truce. U.S. officials described that agreement as a last-ditch effort for peace after talks to end the conflict collapsed this month. [Syria seems on the verge of an uncontrollable disaster]
The group discussing the cease-fire is one of two task forces set up by the Munich meeting. The first was to ensure that all sides of the conflict allow access of humanitarian aid to towns and cities in Syria that have been encircled by government or opposition forces. Aid began to flow, under United Nations auspices, this week. Under the terms of the Munich deal, the United States and Russia are co-chairs of a task force to work out the terms of a cease-fire, including where airstrikes against “terrorist” groups are permitted to continue and how to resolve violations.
The second group, jointly chaired by the United States and Russia, is to work out what they called “modalities” of a “cessation of hostilities,” including the end of the Russian bombing of opposition and civilian areas. The declaration, signed last Friday in Munich, called for the cease-fire to go into effect “within one week,” but an initial meeting of the group, scheduled for Tuesday, was put off without explanation. Each side is also supposed to bring its proxies on board, with Russia and Iran responsible for Assad’s forces­ and Shiite militias from Iraq and Hezbollah that are fighting alongside them, and the United States and its European and Middle Eastern partners in charge of securing agreement from the opposition.
Friday’s meeting was to be chaired, on the U.S. side, by Robert Malley, the White House official in charge of U.S. efforts against the Islamic State. The Obama administration has said that resolving Syria’s civil war would allow both opposition and government forces, along with international partners, to join forces against the Islamic State. One of the many problems to be overcome is a differing definition of what constitutes a terrorist group. In addition to the Islamic State and Jabhat al-Nusra, al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Syria, Russia and Syria have labeled the entire opposition as terrorists.
Aid groups did manage to deliver food and medicine to five besieged towns Wednesday, and U.N. officials said Thursday that they plan more humanitarian shipments. This would include the World Food Program using Russian airplanes to drop aid to the nearly 200,000 people who are besieged in the eastern city of Deir al-Zour by the Islamic State militant group. Jabhat al-Nusra, whose forces are intermingled with moderate rebel groups in the northwest near the Turkish border, is particularly problematic. Russia was said to have rejected a U.S. proposal to leave Jabhat al-Nusra off-limits to bombing as part of a cease-fire, at least temporarily, until the groups can be sorted out.
Both rebel forces and the government are besieging hundreds of thousands of people across Syria, placing them at risk of starvation and other complications related to a lack of adequate food and medicine. Dozens of people have died from starvation-related causes in the government-besieged town of Madaya, near the Syrian capital of Damascus, according to residents and aid groups. The decision by the United States and Russia to hold a preparatory meeting by themselves, without inviting the other 15 members of the group, led to confusion early Friday and reports that the broader meeting had been canceled before it even began.
Jan Egeland, an adviser to de Mistura, the U.N. envoy to Syria, said in a statement Thursday that an agreement had been reached to provide aid to “all of the remaining besieged areas of Syria” before a meeting next week. Any agreement they reach must be presented to the entire group, some members of which are likely to disapprove of parts of whatever the two chairs decided.
Still, de Mistura painted a grim picture of efforts to reduce hostilities in an interview with Svenska Dagbladet, a Swedish newspaper. In it, he all but said that the hoped-for resumption of peace talks Feb. 25 would not happen. A separate task force, established in Munich to press for humanitarian access to communities in Syria besieged by the fighting, brought aid to five areas this week. Jan Egeland, an adviser to Staffan de Mistura, the U.N. special envoy for Syria, said in a statement Thursday that all remaining areas should be reached before that task force meets again next week.
Both the cease-fire and the humanitarian agreements are intended to clear the way for peace talks between the Assad government and the opposition. In an interview with the Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet, de Mistura indicated that it was unlikely those talks would resume as scheduled on Thursday.
“We need real talks about peace, not just talks about talks,” de Mistura was quoted as saying in remarks that were published Thursday and translated by the Associated Press.“We need real talks about peace, not just talks about talks,” de Mistura was quoted as saying in remarks that were published Thursday and translated by the Associated Press.
The U.N. envoy has faced even more difficulty as pro-government forces advance in Aleppo and other areas of Syria. Those successes have in large part been a consequence of Russia’s intervention in September to prevent Assad from falling. Meanwhile, the growing crisis among Russia, Turkey and the United States threatened to overshadow the cease-fire plans. Turkey, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates — all opposition supporters — have said they would send ground troops into Syria, but only as part of a plan by the U.S.-led coalition against the Islamic State, a plan that does not yet exist.
Since then, rebel groups have been pulverized by Moscow’s air raids. The Syrian military — with help from Lebanon’s Hezbollah militia and allied Iranian fighters — have threatened to cut off supply lines that run from Turkey to rebel groups in Aleppo and surrounding areas. At the same time, Turkey has said it will not stop cross-border shelling of Syrian Kurdish forces­ it says are in league with both Russia and Assad to take over Syrian territory along its border, and with Turkey’s outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party, the PKK, which both Turkey and the United States have designated as a terrorist group.
At the same time, a Kurdish-led force known as the Syria Democratic Forces has seized areas in the north from rebels. Turkey has responded with cross-border shelling in response to those advances, which it fears could embolden separatists within its own Kurdish population. Friday’s closed-door Security Council meeting was adjourned until Monday after considering a proposed Russian resolution against Turkey. In November, Turkey shot down a Russian jet that it said had strayed into its airspace from Syria.
Birnbaum reported from Moscow. Daniela Deane in London and Karen DeYoung in Washington contributed to this report. [U.S. support for Syrian Kurds ‘a big strategic mistake,’ Turkish envoy says]
Turkey’s U.N. ambassador, Yasar Halit Cevik, told reporters after the meeting that “Turkey will not be going into Syria with boots on ground if [it is] not a collective action” authorized by the United Nations or the U.S.-led coalition against the Islamic State.
But he said the United States was mistaken in its belief that Syria’s Democratic Union Party, a Kurdish group, was fighting against the Islamic State in northwestern Syria.
“They are not fighting [the Assad] regime or Daesh,” Cevik said, using an Arabic acronym for the Islamic State. “The area they have captured was not from Daesh or al-Nusra, it was captured from the Syrian opposition. The fire is coming from Syrian soil and, based on our rules of engagement, we are retaliating.”
Michael Birnbaum in Moscow, Hugh Naylor in Beirut and Carol Morello in London contributed to this report.
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