Syrian opposition chief meets French president
The head of Syria’s main civil opposition body has met French president Emmanuel Macron amid a renewed international effort to end the country’s civil war.
The meeting took place in Paris yesterday as Nasr Al Hariri, president of the Syrian Negotiation Commission, held a flurry of meetings with European leaders in an effort to push back against peace talks held under Russian auspices in Sochi.
Mr Al Hariri travelled to London off the back of a trip to Brussels on Monday, where he held spoke to senior European Union figures including foreign affairs representative Federica Mogherini, Belgium’s foreign minister Didier Reynders, as well as the United Nations special envoy for Syria, Steffan De Mistura.
Mr Al Hariri is set to visit Italy and Germany later this week to meet their foreign ministers.
After a meeting on Tuesday with UK minister for the Middle East Alister Burt, Mr Al Hariri thanked the UK for its commitment to the UN-led Geneva political process, stressing its importance as the sole forum for Syria’s political solution.
He said Russian support for the Sochi talks was an effort to undermine the Geneva process, to which his organisation has yet to commit.
Following the meeting, Mr Burt said: “After nearly seven years of conflict and over 400,000 deaths, it is abundantly clear that only a political settlement can bring a durable end to the human suffering and the regional instability the conflict fuels.”
On Tuesday, Mr Al Hariri also called on senior EU and North American leaders to get tough on Syrian president Bashar Al Assad.
“It is time for president Trump, chancellor Merkel and prime minister May to say: ‘Stop’. It is time for Trump, Merkel and May to increase pressure and bring the international community together to get a genuine and just political situation in Syria,” he said.
He also emphasised the need to protect civilians in Eastern Ghouta, Idlib, and across Syria facing the government’s “brutal, indiscriminate violence”.
Speaking on Syria, former UK foreign secretary David Miliband urged the UK government not to forget about civilians being killed in the country.
He said: “It cannot be right that civilians are being bombed to hell without the UN Security Council playing any role at all. It has been driven off the scene.”
The next round of talks in the Geneva process is set to begin in Vienna next week.
The talks come amid an offensive launched by the Syrian government on the rebel-held province of Idlib.
Flurry of meetings an attempt to push back against Russian efforts to broker a peace deal