‘Ice is breaking’ in Syria talks

GENEVA: The ice is slowly breaking in peace talks between Syria’s warring sides, UN mediator Lakhdar Brahimi said Wednesday, warning though that no substantive results were expected during this round.
“The ice is breaking, slowly, but it is breaking,” Brahimi told reporters after a fifth day of talks in Geneva, which both sides described as “positive.” He acknowledged he did not expect “anything substantive” to come out of the initial round, which is set to conclude Friday.
But he stressed that simply getting the parties talking for the first time since the conflict erupted in March 2011 was an important step forward.
“These people have not sat together for three years. They do not expect that there’ll be a magic wand,” Brahimi said, insisting he was “not disappointed.”
The delegations from President Bashar Assad’s regime and the opposition National Coalition are set to determine Friday when they will return to Geneva, likely after a week, Brahimi said.
“I hope that the second session will be more structured and hopefully more productive than the first session,” he said.
Opposition delegation spokesman Louay Safi told reporters the future talks would need to show “substantial progress.”
“We’re not going to stay here month after month just talking without progress,” he said.
Meanwhile, the Turkish Army also said it had targeted and destroyed a convoy belonging the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) jihadi group in northern Syria after coming under fire at a border post.
It took months of pressure from Washington, which backs the opposition, and Moscow, Assad’s key international ally and arms supplier, to bring the two sides together.
Their efforts also secured a landmark deal last year to remove and destroy Syria’s chemical arsenal.
Sources close to the world’s chemical watchdog however said Wednesday that less than five percent of the around 700 tons of chemicals that were supposed to have left Syria by Dec. 31 last year have done so.
And in yet another reminder of the urgency of bringing Syria’s bloody civil war to an end, US intelligence said Wednesday that Damascus may now be capable of producing biological weapons.