U.N. Brings Syria Talks Under One Roof, Not Yet Into One Room

• 11.30.2017, 21:52
•  Near East,  World

Reuters

Representatives of Syria’s warring sides sat just meters apart in separate rooms at U.N. peace talks on Thursday, but mediator Staffan de Mistura stopped short of bringing them together in what diplomats had hoped might be a minor breakthrough, Reuters reports.

Previous rounds of talks have gone almost nowhere, with de Mistura shuttling between hotels and meeting multiple delegations separately. A newly unified opposition had raised the possibility of face-to-face talks to speed up the talks.

Although the two delegations were in the U.N. building concurrently, de Mistura kept them apart, dashing between their respective meeting rooms on either side of a corridor.

“We are having what we would call close proximity parallel meetings,” he told the opposition team, after making similar comments to the government delegation, promising to leave them in the hands of his deputy while he went to meet their enemies.

After several hours of talks, chief government negotiator Bashar al-Ja‘afari and his opposition counterpart Nasr Hariri left separately, without commenting to the media.