Syria talks won’t start with direct meetings, Kerry says

DAVOS, Switzerland — The opposing sides won’t initially meet face-to-face in planned Syria peace talks in Geneva next week, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said Thursday, a new sign of obstacles that remain in the latest diplomatic push to end the conflict.

The first U.N.-brokered meeting among Syrian parties will be “proximity talks” in which representatives of the government and opposition gather separately, Kerry said on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum. The talks are tentatively planned to take place Monday, but diplomats say that could slip by as much as a few days.

The cautious, step-bystep approach points to the delicate task faced by U.N. Special Envoy for Syria Staffan de Mistura, who is eager to make concrete progress toward ending the nearly five-year-old war that has claimed more than 250,000 lives, displaced millions and provided an opening to the extremist Islamic State group to seize land.

The intra-Syrian talks also come against the backdrop of a string of recent battlefield victories by the government that have bolstered President Bashar Assad’s hand and plunged the rebels into disarray, raising the prospect that the Geneva talks could become moot as the situation on the ground evolves.

“You are not going to have a situation where people are sitting down at the table staring at each other or shouting at each other,” Kerry said. “You’re going to have to build some process here.”

He laid out a “firmly embedded outline” to the talks in which de Mistura is to shuttle back and forth between delegations and say, “OK, here’s how we envision a cease-fire” to one, and then return to the other side.