BEIRUT - Despite recent rebel setbacks in Syria’s civil war, the main opposition bloc signaled a tough line Tuesday on attending possible peace talks with President Bashar Assad’s regime.
Two senior members of the Syrian National Coalition said the group first wants ironclad guarantees of Assad’s departure as part of any transition deal and more weapons for rebel fighters. The group’s final position is to be hashed out in a three day meeting of its General Assembly in Istanbul, Turkey, later this week.
Tuesday’s comments highlighted the wide gaps between many in the Syrian opposition and the regime just weeks before the U.S. and Russia hope to bring the sides together at an international conference in Geneva.
Over the weekend, Assad also presented a hard line, challenging the idea of transition talks and saying he won’t step down before elections are held. Hours after those comments, his troops launched an offensive against a rebel-held town in western Syria, the latest in a series of military gains by the regime.
“There are many obstacles facing the conference,” Lakhdar Brahimi, the U.N.-Arab League envoy to Syria and lead organizer of the gathering, acknowledged Tuesday, after meeting with the Arab League chief in Cairo.
Much about the conference remains up in the air, including the date, the agenda, timetable and list of participants. Brahimi said the conference, initially envisioned for late May, should be held in June at the latest.
The goal is to launch talks between the regime and the opposition on a transitional government in Syria - an idea that was first adopted by the international community in Geneva a year ago but never got off the ground.
Earlier this month, the U.S. and Russia decided to give diplomacy another try, even though they have been backing opposite sides in the 26-month-old conflict that has killed an estimated 70,000 people. The joint effort was quickly overshadowed by disagreements, particularly over Russian shipments of advanced missiles to Assad,deemed ill-timed and counterproductive by the U.S.
The latest signals from Assad and his Russian allies have left the Syrian National Coalition skeptical about the international conference, said Louay Safi, a member of the group’s decision-making political office.
“We are serious about having negotiations that would lead to a political solution,” Safi said. “But if Assad is not serious, we are not going there for a photo op.”
One of the main sticking points is Assad’s fate. At Russia’s insistence, a compromise at last year’s Geneva conference left open the door to Assad being part of a transitional government.
“We have been very clear that any transitional period must start with the departure of Assad and the heads of the security services,” Khalid Saleh, the spokesman of the Syrian National Coalition, said Tuesday.
Safi also said the coalition won’t attend if many other opposition representatives do as well. The opposition remains fractured among rival groups, though the coalition has been recognized by its Western and Arab sponsors as the legitimate representative of the Syrian people.
Haitham Manna, a leader of one of the rival groups, the National Coordination Body, said the coalition should not attend peace talks alone. Unlike the still largely exile-based Syrian National Coalition, Manna’s alliance of 16 groups has roots in Syria and is more open to compromise with members of the regime,though not with Assad.
“The military way is a dead end, there can be no winners,” Manna said. “And if there is a winner, he will leave behind enough hatred to turn every loser into a suicide bomber.”
The U.S., Russia and several other nations also will participate in the conference, if it takes place. Obama administration officials have refused to rule out the participation of Assad’s biggest military backer, Iran.
Secretary of State John Kerry, meanwhile, will meet with 10 of America’s closest Arab and European allies in Jordan today.
In Syria, regime troops were trying for a third day Tuesday to wrest control of the western town of Qusair from the rebels. The town lies along a strategic land corridor linking the capital Damascus with the Mediterranean coast, the heartland of Assad’s Alawite sect.
Warplanes launched airstrikes Tuesday morning on Qusair, in the central province of Homs, as clashes raging between rebels and Hezbollah fighters left two rebels dead, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a watchdog group based in Britain with contacts in Syria.
Government forces also lobbed mortar shells at Qusair as clashes intensified on the outskirts of the city, according to the Local Coordination Committees, a network of activists tracking the fighting.
The Syrian state news agency, SANA, said Tuesday that army units had killed rebels in the northern and central districts of Qusair, destroying tunnels, weapons and explosive devices as it moved in from the eastern section that the government said it seized Monday.
The agency said a commander of the Al Nusra Front, the extremist rebel group labeled a terrorist organization by the United States, had been killed.
UNICEF said it was “extremely concerned” about the safety of civilians in Qusair. The U.N. child protection agency said up to 20,000 civilians, many of them women and children, could be trapped there by the fighting.
Also Tuesday, Israeli and Syrian troops exchanged fire across their tense cease-fire line in the Golan Heights, prompting an Israeli threat that Syria’s leader will “bear the consequences” of further escalation and raising new concerns that the civil war could explode into a region wide conflict.
The incident marked the first time the Syrian army has acknowledged firing intentionally at Israeli troops since the civil war began. Assad’s regime appears to be trying to project toughness in response to recent Israeli airstrikes near Damascus.
In Geneva, U.N. officials said the number of Syrian refugees arriving in Jordan has suddenly fallen from an average of 2,500 a day to fewer than 20.
Millions of people have been displaced in the civil war, and Jordan has taken in hundreds of thousands of them. U.N. officials said they were unsure what led to the drop in the flow of refugees to Jordan this week.
Information for this article was contributed by Bradley S. Klapper, Karin Laub, Zeina Karam, Aya Batrawy, John Heilprin and Josef Federman of The Associated Press and by Hania Mourtada and Anne Barnard of The New York Times.
Front Section, Pages 6 on 05/22/2013