Syria’s opposition resumed talks yesterday aimed at closing their fractious ranks, crucial to launching an international peace conference, and government forces pressed an onslaught on a rebel-held town to try to gain the upper hand in the civil war.
More than 22 people in opposition-held areas were killed by yesterday afternoon
Failure of the opposition to unite could weaken the hand of conference co-sponsors Russia and the US in ending Syria’s conflict, which has killed 80,000 people and threatens to spill across borders and whip up wider sectarian conflict.
The US and Russian foreign ministers are to meet in Paris tomorrow to discuss how to shepherd Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and the opposition into peace talks in Geneva the two world powers have jointly proposed.
As opposition leaders met in Istanbul, Assad’s forces, reinforced by Lebanese Hezbollah fighters unleashed heavy artillery and tank fire to seize more rebel terrain in the border town of Qusair yesterday, sources on both sides said. More than 22 people in opposition-held areas were killed by yesterday afternoon, most of them rebels, and dozens wounded, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
Assad’s forces are believed to have seized about two-thirds of Qusair and largely surrounded the rebels. But the price was high and rebels insisted they were preventing further advances. An official close to Hezbollah told Reuters: “We are in the second phase of our plan of attack but the advance has been quite slow and difficult. The rebels have mined everything, the streets, the houses. Even the refrigerators are mined.”
The insurgents see Qusair as a critical battle to preserve cross-border supply lines and deny Assad a victory they fear may give him the edge in the prospective peace talks next month.
Sources at the Syrian National Coalition (SNC), which began its third day of meetings, said major players would now focus on international demands for a broadening of the Islamist-dominated group, leaving leadership issues for later.
Attempts to strike a grand bargain involving veteran liberal campaigner Michel Kilo and businessman Mustafa al-Sabbagh, Qatar’s point man in the coalition, went nowhere in talks that stretched overnight, senior coalition sources said.
“We are back to square one,” one of them told Reuters.
On the sidelines of an African Union summit in Addis Ababa, US Secretary of State John Kerry appealed to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon “to try to get something moving with respect to Syria,” according to a pool reporter.
Ban told Kerry he and his special Syria envoy Lakhdar Brahimi “are working very hard to convene, to make this Geneva conference a success.”
Concerned by the rising influence of hardline Islamists, the US has pressed the opposition coalition to resolve its divisions and bring more liberals into the fold.
Saudi Arabia, the most powerful Arab adversary of Assad, has agreed to play a more active role in furthering the coalition cause, diplomats and coalition members said.