Kerry visits Putin to prepare for talks on Syria

This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service - if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read the FAQ at http://ift.tt/jcXqJW.

Thursday 17 Dec 2015 - 13:12 Makkah mean time-6-3-1437 Moscow, (IINA) - US Secretary of State John Kerry organized on Tuesday a new round of talks aimed at ending the Syrian civil war that could also align the US and Russia more firmly in strategies for fighting ISIS, New York Times reported. After an extended trip to Paris for climate talks, Kerry met for nearly four hours with President Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin, in talks intended to smooth differences over a planned round of Syria negotiations scheduled to take place in New York on Friday. The US and Russia have long been at odds over Syria. Russia aims to keep Syrian Regime Leader Bashar al-Assad in power while the US seeks to oust him by backing rebels. A previous attempt to broker a solution to the conflict failed, and it remains unclear whether the two sides will reach a compromise this time. Among the issues to be decided in the run-up to the proposed talks is which of the dozens of militias fighting in Syria should speak for the Syrian opposition, and which should be designated as terrorist organizations. On Tuesday, the diplomats said they had narrowed a gap on defining which Syrian militias belonged on a terrorist list. Kerry noted that a final list might be ready by Friday. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said that his country would accept a delegation of Syrian opposition groups at negotiations on Friday if they arrived under the auspices of a United Nations moderator. Moscow had earlier objected that groups it considers terrorists might wind up in the delegation. “There’s no question that when the United States and Russia work together our two countries benefit, and I think everybody else does, too”, he said. “Despite our differences we demonstrated that when our countries pull together, progress can be made”. It is noteworthy that the US, Russia, the EU, and Middle Eastern countries had agreed in Vienna last month on a timeline of two years to hold new elections in Syria but left the question of Assad’s fate unsettled. AG/IINA