Syria Peace Hopes Dim Further as Opposition Rejects Moscow Talks

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/14/world/middleeast/syria-peace-talk-hopes-fade.html

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BEIRUT, Lebanon — As the world focused last week on the attacks by Islamist extremists in Paris, hopes were fading for the latest effort to wind down the war in Syria, a conflict seen as driving radicalization among Muslims worldwide.

For months, Russia has been working to persuade government and opposition figures to attend preliminary talks in Moscow on Jan. 26 that are aimed at starting a new peace process. But in recent days, several leading opposition figures, apparently doubting Russia’s credibility as a mediator, said they would not attend, undermining the initiative.

Chief among them was Moaz al-Khatib, a cleric from Damascus who is one of the few exiled figures who retains credibility among opposition fighters inside Syria, and who had earlier urged colleagues to take the talks seriously. But he declared on his Facebook page that he would not attend, saying, “We don’t have the conditions for the success of this meeting.”

The only other international proposal on the table — a freeze in fighting in the contested city of Aleppo proposed by the United Nations envoy, Staffan de Mistura — has yet to gain momentum, though officials continue to meet with the dozens of players who would need to agree even to that modest, incremental plan.

As Syria increasingly becomes the world’s problem, all sides in the conflict have reason to re-evaluate their positions. Falling oil prices are putting stress on Russia and Iran, the main backers of Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad. Another Assad ally, the Lebanese Shiite militant group Hezbollah, faces the prospect of a large population of Sunni refugees from Syria becoming permanent, altering the country’s sectarian balance of power.

On the other side, the United States, though it has long called for Mr. Assad’s ouster, increasingly appears to see checking the growth of the Islamic State extremist group as a higher priority. Turkey, a major backer of the revolt against Mr. Assad, faces a growing burden from a refugee crisis that will only deepen as the conflict goes on.

Inside the country, relatively moderate Syrian insurgents are losing ground to extremist groups like the Nusra Front and the Islamic State in the northern regions that were long their center of gravity. The government is depleting its manpower and increasingly relying on foreign Shiite militias and irregular forces.

Yet these predicaments do not seem to have moved major players closer to compromise. The Syrian government seems to believe the world has decided that Mr. Assad is staying in power.

“The hard days in Syria are gone, and now we are getting out of the tunnel,” Bouthaina Shaaban, a presidential adviser, told Lebanon’s Al Mayadeen television last week.

At the same time, many armed opposition groups, as well as the main exile opposition coalition, refuse to discuss any political solution that does not involve Mr. Assad leaving.

Many ordinary Syrians, on the other hand, while mistrustful of international powers they see as having abandoned them to their fate, are willing to try almost anything.

Nasser al-Hariri, a top official in the Syrian opposition coalition based in Istanbul, said he had been surprised on a recent visit to southern Turkey to find many people involved in the opposition interested in exploring Moscow’s proposal. The coalition has been vociferously critical of the initiative.

“People were saying: ‘We’ve been trying the American approach for years, and we’ve gotten nothing. Let’s try Moscow,’ ” even at the expense of angering the United States and its allies, he said.

Despite Russia’s alliance with Mr. Assad against the nearly four-year insurgency, some Assad opponents initially said they were ready to try out Moscow’s approach — a measure, they said, of the desperation that many Syrians on all sides feel over a war that has displaced nearly half the population and killed more than 200,000 people, with no end in sight.

The momentum was lost, diplomats familiar with the planning say, when it became apparent that Moscow was allowing the Syrian government to cherry-pick its interlocutors, issuing invitations to individuals rather than to the various opposition groups.

That led to the withdrawal of Mr. Khatib, as well as of a group led by Louay Hussein, an opposition figure from inside Syria who was recently arrested by the government.

For now, the Moscow meeting is expected to go ahead, though its chances of making even modest progress currently appear limited.