The Syrian civil war has now been raging for nearly four years. The conflict has killed more than 200,000 people and has displaced nearly half the population of Syria; yet it seems a political settlement is no closer.
The American-led push for peace, known as the Geneva Process, is all but dead in the water. The US has not officially backed down from its call for President Bashar Al-Assad’s resignation as a prerequisite for any lasting settlement.
The latest drive for a diplomatic solution is headed by Russia, which has consistently backed the Syrian government, both in terms of political support and by sending arms. Moscow is convening talks between the warring factions on 26-29 January. America has given its support to the conference. “We hope that Russian efforts could be helpful,” the US Secretary of State John Kerry said this week.
But the process is already beset by problems. Several leading opposition figures have said they will not attend, including those among the more moderate rebel groups. They have suggested that Russia’s continued support for the Assad regime makes it an inappropriate broker for talks, calling into question its impartiality. Amongst those refusing to take part in talks is the Western-backed National Coalition for Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces, seen by the US as the legitimate representative of the Syrian opposition. The New York Times reported this week that US officials had told this group that it had nothing to lose by attending talks, but that the US was not putting pressure on Syrian opposition figures to attend.
Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, warned that opposition groups who did not attend the summit could jeopardise their influence in the long run. “Those who decide not to take part in this event, they will lose in terms of their positions in the peace talks process as a whole,” he told a news conference.
When it rejected the invitation to Moscow, the National Coalition said that it would attend talks only if there was a guarantee that Al-Assad would give up power. This remains unlikely. Russia, which is after all Al-Assad’s main ally, said that the president’s exit should not be a precondition to talks, and that the emphasis should be on fighting Islamist militants.
The question of Al-Assad’s exit has been a stumbling block for many rounds of talks over the last few years. Opposition activists continue to call for this as a minimum requirement, while Al-Assad and his regime remain intransigent.
This is not the only current attempt to broker peace in Syria. The United Nation’s envoy for the crisis in Syria, Staffan de Mistura, has been pushing ahead with a strategy of pursuing local ceasefires. Starting with the contested city of Aleppo, de Mistura hopes that this could lead to a gradual de-escalation of violence on the ground. “The Syrian people are just saying – ‘enough’,” he announced recently. His plan is to use this war-weariness to seek a ceasefire in Aleppo that could then be used as a model for ceasefires elsewhere in the country. This could, in theory, eventually lead to a political solution from the bottom up.
“I will continue pushing for Aleppo, because Aleppo has become an iconic example of where things could start sending the best signal,” he said. Critics have argued that local ceasefires agreed in the past have essentially boiled down to capitulation from desperate populations after sieges by the Syrian army.
Given that the war is still raging after four years, it will clearly take a multipronged approach to find peace. It is important to pursue these different avenues, particularly given that the Moscow conference – like other rounds of peace talks before it – has failed in its goal before it has even begun.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.