GENEVA (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 10th September, 2018) UN Special Envoy for Syria Staffan de Mistura will meet for the second time with representatives of the three Syria guarantor states - Russia, Turkey and Iran - in Geneva to discuss the formation of the Syrian constitutional commission and the situation in Idlib province.
The first meeting of the kind took place in June. Now it will also last two days, September 10-11, and is supposed to go further into details of the composition of the future Syrians-only body.
The decision to set up the commission, tasked with introducing changes to the country's constitution, was made at the Syrian National Dialogue Congress in the Russian resort city of Sochi in January. De Mistura, who is in charge of forming the commission, is expected to single out some 40 people from 150 candidates from guarantor countries, government, opposition groups and civil society.
The guarantors are represented by Russian Special Presidential Envoy for Syria Alexander Lavrentiev and Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Vershinin, Turkish Deputy Foreign Minister Sedat Onal and Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Hossein Jaberi Ansari.
Issues that are to be reviewed are the composition, decision-making process, ways to get out of the situation of impasse, and the time frames for its work.
There is a feeling among the guarantors and the UN of the need to launch the constitutional commission in as soon as possible, since the idea was first announced eight months ago. When the guarantor states met just few days before Geneva at a presidential level in Tehran, Russian President Vladimir Putin said all necessary conditions had been created for the Syrians to independently decide their future destiny.
Another issue that the guarantor states and de Mistura will not avoid to review is the current situation in Idlib province - the last area in the country dominated by the armed opposition.
According to the United Nations, Idlib is the base for approximately 10,000 members of the Nusra Front and al-Qaeda terrorist groups (both banned in Russia). The Nusra Front terror organization is the backbone of a terrorist alliance called Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which groups five radical Islamist factions and is widely regarded as the dominant force on the ground in the province. The Syrian government has pledged to drive the remaining terrorists out of Idlib and has begun taking steps toward a full-scale military operation in the area.
Russian officials have repeatedly warned that HTS terrorists are planning a false-flag chemical weapons attack in Idlib in a bid to provoke Western retaliation against the Syrian government.
In Tehran, the three leaders voiced their concern over the current crisis. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan proposed to declare a ceasefire in Idlib, but Russian President Vladimir Putin argued that the three leaders could not undertake any obligations on behalf of various militant groups, though he noted the appropriateness of Erdogan's proposal.
Later on the same day, de Mistura addressed the Security Council in New York, where he for the first time said directly that the armed opposition groups in Idlib demonstrate unwillingness to separate themselves from the Nusra Front terrorist group (banned in Russia). He called on the international community to review possible steps for the separation between civilians and terrorists, as well as between extremists and other armed groups, and noted that ideally all militants should be removed from the province with a deadline.
Ahead of the guarantors' representatives arrival in Geneva, de Mistura said this meeting would be "an important moment of truth."
On September 14, a few days after hosting Russian, Turkish and Iranian officials, the UN Special Envoy will hold the meeting with senior diplomats from the so-called Small Group on Syria - Egypt, France, Germany, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the United Kingdom and the United States. They will also discuss the UN efforts to establish a constitutional committee in Syria.
