Beirut: Syrian rebels will not attend the Russian-backed talks scheduled to take place on Tuesday and Wednesday in Kazakhstan’s capital, Astana.
A member of the opposition who attended previous Syria talks in Astana said on Monday they were not going because the Syrian government has not complied with a ceasefire deal.
The Syrian government and rebel groups agreed in December to a nationwide ceasefire backed by Russia and Turkey.
Ousama Abu Zeid, a legal adviser to the Free Syrian Army and a member of the delegation to the previous Astana meetings, wrote on Facebook that Damascus has not lived up to many of the deal’s provisions.
“Forced displacement is continuing... no aid has entered besieged areas, there’s been no release of any detainees and the shelling is continuing to kill the civilians,” Ahmed Ramadan, head of the press office at the Syrian National Coalition, said.
The Syrian government is to be joined at the Astana talks by Russia, Turkey and Iran. The previous rounds in January and February did not yield any concrete outcomes.
Inside Syria, a Russian-brokered deal was reached last week between government forces and residents of Al Waer neighbourhood, a rebel district in the central province of Homs, which was besieged by government forces for about five months.
It stipulates that around 12,000 people will leave Al Waer area, among them 2,500 fighters, Rami Abdel Rahman, head of the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, said.
Abdel Rahman described the agreement as “a new forced displacement” for Syrians by the regime and their allies. Al Waer is the only neighbourhood still under rebel-control in Homs after government troops took over the city in 2014. An estimated 50,000 people are believed to be living in Al Waer, down from about 300,000 before the start of the Syrian conflict in 2011.
Violence against children in war-ravaged Syria was “at its worst” in 2016, the UN’s children’s agency said on Monday as the conflict nears its seventh year.
Unicef said that cases of children being killed, maimed, or recruited into armed groups were the “highest on record” last year.
“The depth of suffering is unprecedented. Millions of children in Syria come under attack on a daily basis, their lives turned upside down,” said Geert Cappelaere, Unicef’s regional director. “Each and every child is scarred for life with horrific consequences on their health, well-being, and future,” he said from the Syrian city of Homs. — dpa/AFP
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