Representatives of Syria's main opposition body arrived in Switzerland today for UN-organised peace talks as the starvation death toll rose in Madaya, one of a string of besieged towns in the war-ravaged country.
The High Negotiations Committee (HNC) begrudgingly bowed only late yesterday to US and Saudi pressure to at least show up in Geneva to test the waters for joining the biggest push yet to end a five-year-old civil war.
But the body insists it will not engage in formal negotiations, even indirectly, with President Bashar al-Assad's regime until UN Security Council resolutions requiring an end to sieges of towns are adhered to.
"We will not sit down at the negotiating table if our people continue to be massacred," HNC spokesman Salem al-Meslet said today. It is also pressing for bombardments of civilians to cease.
Highlighting the dire situation, Doctors Without Borders (MSF) today said 16 more people had starved to death in Madaya, with several dozen more residents in "danger of death" because of severe malnutrition.
Madaya is one of four towns included in a rare deal last year intended to halt fighting and allow in humanitarian aid, but access remains limited both there and in the rebel-besieged towns of Fuaa and Kafraya.
Yesterday, the scheduled start of a planned six months of talks under an ambitious roadmap set out in Vienna in November, protesters highlighted the plight of ordinary Syrians with "siege soup" of grass and leaves.
More than 4.5 million people with immense humanitarian needs are living in areas extremely hard to access because of fighting, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said today.
A source close to the HNC said that the group was sending 17 negotiators and 25 others to the Swiss city. A 16-member delegation representing Assad's government arrived yesterday.
Backed by external powers embroiled in Syria's war, the talks are seeking to end a conflict that has killed more than 260,000 people and fuelled the meteoric rise of the extremist Islamic State group.
Millions of those fleeing the conflict have sought refuge in neighbouring countries and hundreds of thousands have risked their lives to reach Europe.
Dozens of migrant men, women and children, including Syrians, today drowned when their boat sank off of Turkey -- joining the almost 4,000 who died trying to reach Europe by sea in 2015.
The influx has also created tensions in Europe. Dozens of masked men believed to belong to neo-Nazi gangs carried out a number of assaults on migrants in Stockholm overnight, police said Saturday.
The complexities of the Syrian conflict, involving a tangled web of moderate rebels, Islamist fighters, Kurds, jihadists and regime forces backed by Moscow and Iran, pose a huge challenge to the talks, experts say.
