New delegation for UN backed Syria peace talks announced

Syria’s main opposition body, the High Negotiation Committee (HNC) on Sunday approved a new 21-member delegation, including representatives from 10 opposition groups, for a new round of UN-sponsored peace talks in Geneva scheduled for 20 February.

The delegation will be headed by Nasr Al-Hariri, a member of the National Coalition, replacing Assad Al-Zoabi, who led the opposition at several previous rounds of talks in Geneva last year.

The delegation’s chief negotiator was named as Mohamed Sabra, a lawyer who was part of the opposition’s technical team during negotiations in Geneva in 2014.

He replaces Mohamad Alloush, a combatant from the powerful Jaish Al-Islam faction. No reason was given for the decision to replace either Al-Zoabi or Alloush.

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The delegation includes representatives from several opposition groups, including Faylaq Al-Sham, a militant faction active around Damascus, and Liwa Sultan Murad, a battalion close to Turkey.

The HNC, which is believed to be the main umbrella group, said in a statement after two-days of meetings in the Saudi capital, Riyadh, that the negotiating team also included members of two dissident alliances with which it has previously been at odds. They are the Moscow and Cairo groups.

Those two alliances – Moscow and Cairo groups – have long disavowed the armed rebellion and insisted that political change can only come through peaceful activism. Their members include a former Syrian government minister with close ties to Moscow.

The HNC said in the statement the goal of the negotiations was a political transition under UN auspices in which Assad had no role in the future of the country. But it steered away from its previous insistence that the Syrian president should leave at the start of a transitional phase.

Read: Syrian says Astana terms must be implemented before Geneva talks

The HNC also said foreign powers had no right to present a vision of Syria’s future political system without the consent of the Syrian people. Russia last month tabled the draft of a proposed new constitution for Syria, though it insisted the document had been circulated for the purposes of discussion only.

The HNC represented the opposition in Geneva talks last year but it was not invited to the recently convened talks in the Kazakh capital, Astana. Indirect talks between government and rebel delegates in Astana were held with the aim of shoring up a ceasefire brokered by Turkey and Russia.