The UN secretary-general has instructed his special envoy to Syria to relaunch a political process aimed at ending the four-year-old conflict, the clearest sign yet that a plan to freeze hostilities in key cities has failed.
Ban Ki-moon spoke to reporters yesterday about his new directive for Staffan de Mistura, the third UN envoy trying to end the conflict which has claimed more than 220,000 lives and driven some 9 million of the prewar population of 23 million from their homes.
The UN chief ordered de Mistura late last month to consult widely with UN Security Council members, regional governments and the Syrian parties themselves "to operationalise and flesh out" elements of the roadmap for a Syrian political transition adopted at a meeting on June 30, 2012 in Geneva by key nations.
The roadmap starts with the establishment of a transitional governing body vested with full executive powers and ends with elections but there has been no agreement on how to implement it. It would require Syrian President Bashar Assad to relinquish power at some unspecified point.
But a senior UN diplomat this week said de Mistura is looking toward new political talks that build on meetings in Moscow, Cairo and elsewhere, not necessarily another round in Geneva.
De Mistura's predecessor Lakhdar Brahimi, who was the joint UN-Arab League mediator, led two rounds of peace talks with most of Syria's key players that ended in February 2014 without a breakthrough.
Since then, Russia, which staunchly backs the Assad government, has held another two rounds of peace talks, the latest this week in Moscow. They were boycotted by the leading Syrian opposition group but attended by a representative from de Mistura's office.
De Mistura, who was appointed by Ban last year, announced in late October that he was pursuing an "action plan" that involved freezing conflict in certain areas to allow for humanitarian aid and local steps of a political process toward wider peace. He wanted to start with Aleppo, but in early March the main opposition and rebel factions in the northern city rejected his proposal to freeze fighting in parts of the city, once Syria's largest.
