Anger at U.S. aid hangs up Syria talks

Day’s try for peace ends early but ‘nobody’s walking out,’ negotiator says

Syrian Deputy Foreign Minister Faisal al-Mikdad speaks after a meeting with the Syrian opposition at the United Nations headquarters in Geneva on Tuesday.
Syrian Deputy Foreign Minister Faisal al-Mikdad speaks after a meeting with the Syrian opposition at the United Nations headquarters in Geneva on Tuesday.

GENEVA - Syrian government anger over a U.S. decision to resume aid to the opposition prompted the United Nations mediator to cut short Tuesday’s peace talks, but he said no one was to blame for the impasse and that the negotiations would continue.

A deal to allow humanitarian aid into Homs remained stalled, with the Syrian delegation demanding assurances the U.S. aid will not go to “armed and terrorist groups” in the besieged city.

U.N.-Arab League mediator Lakhdar Brahimi said he was relieved that the government and opposition said they will remain in the daily talks through Friday, as planned.

“Nobody’s walking out. Nobody’s running away,” he said. “We have not actually made a breakthrough, but we are still at it, and this is enough as far as I’m concerned.”

Tuesday’s talks were the fifth day of negotiations regarding the civil war, focusing on opposition calls for the formation of a transition government in Syria and help for Homs.

But there has been little progress toward resolving a key issue of whether President Bashar Assad should step aside and transfer power to a transitional government.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, whose country has been a key Syrian ally, said Moscow wants to avoid “another obsession with regime change because of somebody’s personal animosity, personal hatred to a particular individual.”

“Imagine Assad disappears. Who is going to keep it together? There is no answer,” Lavrov said in Brussels, where a Russia-European Union summit was being held.

Brahimi said he decided to cut short Tuesday’s talks “without any request or pressure from anyone.”

He confirmed that the Syrian government delegation had talked at length about its opposition to the resumption of U.S. aid.

“We believe this is not the best present to the Geneva conference,” said Faisal al-Mikdad, Syria’s deputy foreign minister, calling the American decision “another manifestation of U.S. support for terrorist groups” in Syria.

“This proves again that the United States is not interested in the success of this process, and we believe the U.S. has to desist and stop its claims that it is interested in the success of this conference,” he said.

American officials said Monday that the U.S. has restarted deliveries of nonlethal aid to the Syrian opposition, more than a month after al-Qaida-linked militants seized warehouses and prompted a sudden cutoff of Western supplies to the rebels.

The officials said the communications equipment and other items are being funneled only to nonarmed opposition groups.

“Any notion that we support terrorists is ludicrous. The Assad regime is a magnet for terrorists,” U.S. State Department spokesman Edgar Vasquez said in a statement.

In Syria on Tuesday, a United Nations official was negotiating with rebel fighters in besieged neighborhoods of a central Syrian city to allow the evacuation of civilians, the provincial governor and an activist said Tuesday.

Two days earlier, a tentative agreement was reached at peace talks in Geneva between the Syrian government and its opponents for the evacuation of women and children trapped in Homs before aid convoys enter. Brahimi said security problems were delaying the evacuation.

The old city of Homs has been under siege for nearly two years.

An activist in Homs who goes by the name Firas al-Homsi confirmed that talks were taking place, and said the government was “ refusing to allow food” into the area.

The United Nations had trucks loaded with food for up to 2,500 people ready at a warehouse outside Homs, but had not yet received authorization to proceed, a World Food Program spokesman said Tuesday.

Meanwhile, Islamist rebels and extremist groups have seized control of most of Syria’s oil and gas resources and are using the proceeds to underwrite their fights against one another as well as Assad, U.S. officials said on condition of anonymity.

While the oil and gas fields are in serious decline, control of them has bolstered the fortunes of the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant and the Nusra Front, both of which are offshoots of al-Qaida. The Islamic State is even selling fuel to the Assad government, lending weight to allegations by opposition leaders that it is secretly working with Damascus to weaken the other rebel groups and discourage international support for their cause.

Although there is no clear evidence of direct tactical coordination between the Islamic State and Assad, U.S. officials said his government has facilitated the group’s rise not only by purchasing its oil but also by exempting some of its headquarters from the airstrikes that have targeted other rebel groups.

The Nusra Front and other groups are providing fuel to the government, too, in exchange for electricity and relief from airstrikes, opposition activists in Syria’s oil regions said.

Information for this article was contributed by Juergen Baetz, Albert Aji, Bassem Mroue and Maamoun Youssef of The Associated Press and by Nick Cumming-Bruce, Anne Barnard, Ben Hubbard, Clifford Krauss and Eric Schmitt of The New York Times.

Front Section, Pages 6 on 01/29/2014

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