Zarif Says It Is Up to U.N. to Decide Who Represents Syrian Opposition in Geneva Talks

International

DAVOS, Switzerland, (ST)- Iran’s Foreign Minister Javad Zarif has stressed  that it was up to the United Nations Special Envoy for Syria Staffan De Mistura not to the Saudi Foreign Minister to decide who should represent the Syrian opposition in the talks with the Syrian government due to start this month in Geneva.

Zarif on Wednesday told a news conference at the World Economic Forum in Davos that the opposition delegation should not include members of internationally recognized “terrorist groups”.

 

Those were so-called “Islamic State”, also known as ISIS or Daesh, al Qaeda and the Nusra Front, he said, adding that 10 “card-carrying members” of al Qaeda had attended an opposition meeting in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, convened allegedly to form a delegation for the Geneva talks.

Zarif reiterated that there is no military solution to the crisis in Syria and pointed out that it is not logical to put preconditions or determine any results before the talks start.

He repeated Tehran’s insistence that it was up to Syrians to decide the fate of their country’s leadership through elections after a new constitution is negotiated in the scheduled talks.

On Tuesday, the Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir announced his rejection of what he called “any pressure” on the Syrian opposition in terms of forming its delegation.

Hamda Mustafa 

You might also like
feature

Polyansky: Israel and Ukraine are waging a war against humanity

International

Granting green light to Israeli settlers to raid Al-Aqsa Mosque in big numbers a…

International

Dozens of settlers storm Al-Aqsa

International

Pushlin Foreign ships in the port of Mariupol return to their countries

.. _copyright: Copyright ========= .. code-block:: none Copyright (C) 1998-2000 Tobias Ratschiller Copyright (C) 2001-2018 Marc Delisle Olivier Müller Robin Johnson Alexander M. Turek Michal Čihař Garvin Hicking Michael Keck Sebastian Mendel [check credits for more details] This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2, as published by the Free Software Foundation. This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details. You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see . Third party licenses ++++++++++++++++++++ phpMyAdmin includes several third-party libraries which come under their respective licenses. jQuery's license, which is where we got the files under js/vendor/jquery/ is (MIT|GPL), a copy of each license is available in this repository (GPL is available as LICENSE, MIT as js/vendor/jquery/MIT-LICENSE.txt). The download kit additionally includes several composer libraries. See their licensing information in the vendor/ directory.