The UN’s Syria envoy has defended the peace process he is orchestrating in Geneva and denied that it offers the Assad regime a smokescreen for attacks on rebels, after the Syrian leader dismissed it as an irrelevance that was just for show.

About four days of indirect talks between government and opposition envoys are expected to start on Tuesday, marking the sixth round of talks mediated by Staffan de Mistura since early last year.

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De Mistura said the Syrian government delegation was “here to work”, after Assad said at the weekend that “nothing substantial” would come out of the summit, which was “merely a meeting for the media”.

Assad said he was more interested in the plans for de-escalation zones set out by Turkey, Russia and Iran at separate talks held in the Kazakh capital, Astana.



De Mistura insisted the Geneva political talks had to be seen in tandem, and not in conflict, with Astana, and that there was no solution to Syria’s devastating six-year civil war without a political settlement on the horizon.

Challenged on the purpose of the talks given the attitude of Assad, De Mistura claimed the Syrian president would not be sending an 18-strong delegation to Geneva led by his highly experienced ambassador to the UN, Bashar al-Jaafari, unless it was interested in the political process. He insisted the Syrian government contribution was a much more substantive statement than its remarks to cameras.

De Mistura denied he had become an unwitting smokescreen for Assad’s continued military assault on opposition forces, saying “the alternative is no hope, no discussion, no political horizon and just waiting for the acts on the ground to take place”.



He also claimed to be encouraged that the US administration of Donald Trump was showing “increasing interest and engagement” in the Syria peace process, and suggested deescalation zones might require the presence of international troops endorsed by the UN security council. The geographical boundaries of the de-escalation zones are due to be agreed by the three signatories to the Astana memorandum by 4 June.

De Mistura said the Geneva talks would be working all week on the “four baskets” he has previously set out: a credible non-sectarian transitional government; a future constitution largely drafted by Russia; early and free parliamentary elections within 18 months; and a united war against terrorism within Syria.

He told a press conference the meetings were going to be more business-like, held in smaller rooms and quicker – all in a bid to make progress. De Mistura hoped all the delegations would desist from set piece press conferences, which he clearly feels lead to delegations making inflexible statements that impede private reconciliation.

Since the 4 May de-escalation deal signed at Astana, but not yet endorsed by the UN security council, fighting has slowed across swaths of the country. However, on Sunday the Assad regime secured the evacuation of three rebel-held districts in the capital, Damascus, bringing the city closer to full regime control for the first time since 2012.

Some regional Gulf powers admit privately they are close to abandoning hope with the Geneva process, and are looking at other options, such as going straight to parliamentary elections. They regard some of the de-escalation zones, such as in the south of Syria as more viable than those proposed in the north.