Apr 24, 2019

Senior officials from Turkey, Iran and Russia are expected to gather in the Kazakh capital of Nur Sultan tomorrow for the latest round of Syria peace talks sponsored by the regional heavyweights.

UN special envoy for Syria Geir Pedersen is expected to take part in the talks in the Kazakh capital, formerly known as Astana, after meeting in Geneva with the United States’ Syria envoy James Jeffrey. The veteran US diplomat is seeking to revive UN-sponsored peace talks to end the eight-year conflict. Critics view the effort as a bid to place a US imprimatur on Syria’s post-war future. They argue it's doomed because of the Donald Trump administration’s current policy of strangling the regime through sanctions, while demanding a full withdrawal of Iranian forces as a prerequisite for easing these. The Geneva talks need consensus between all the main stakeholders in Syria, who — with the exception of the United States — have been building just that through the Astana track, which was launched in 2017.

This round is expected to mark the announcement of a Constitutional Committee that is supposed to draw up a new constitution for Syria. The formation of the committee, which will precede elections, has been delayed by the Syrian regime’s unremitting objections to the inclusion of at least four individuals representing the Free Syrian Army-linked opposition. But Turkey’s state-run TRT World reported that Pedersen had managed to persuade President Bashar al-Assad to relent. Previous attempts to form the committee have been stymied by last-minute squabbles, a pattern that may well be repeated in Nur Sultan.

Turkey has reportedly, with Russia’s backing, won its battle to keep the Syrian Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD) off the committee just as it had succeeded in keeping the group out of the UN talks. The PYD is the political arm of the the Syrian Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG), and Turkey views both as terroristic due to their links to the Kurdistan Workers Party, which has been waging an insurgency for 35 years inside Turkey.

The status of Idlib will also be on the table. Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Vershinin confirmed this, saying, “We will discuss the situation on the ground and what we need to do in order to definitively eliminate the threat, particularly the one that is currently emanating from the terrorist enclave in Idlib."