Syria opposition groups to meet in Astana next week

    Kazakh Foreign Minister Yerlan Idrissov says Syrian opposition groups will hold meetings in Kazakhstan’s capital, Astana, in the coming days.
    “Talks of the Syrian opposition are expected to take place in Astana next week,” Idrissov said, according to a Twitter post by the Kazakh Foreign Ministry on Thursday.
    The message on the social media website gave no further details.
    A report by Russian news agency TASS, however, said representatives from the groups had “sent an official request to Kazakhstan President Nursultan Nazarbayev for mediation at further talks on resolving the Syrian crisis.”
    This came as Syria’s foreign-backed opposition group, the so-called Syrian National Coalition (SNC), refused to attend talks in the Swiss city of Geneva with the United Nations (UN) special envoy to Syria in early May.
    Previous UN-mediated talks on Syria, dubbed Geneva I and II, failed to find a solution to end the four-year conflict in the Arab country.
    The two conferences ended in failure after the foreign-sponsored opposition figures in the talks refused to discuss widespread terrorism in the country and persisted in demanding the ouster of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad as a precondition.
    In January, representatives from the Syrian government and opposition parties held talks in the Russian capital, Moscow, in a bid to resume long-stalled peace talks.
    Russia mediated between representatives from the Syrian government and domestic opposition after foreign-based opposition figures from the so-called Syrian National Coalition, refused to take part in the talks.
    President Assad has voiced support for Russia’s efforts to broker peace in his country.
    Syria has been grappling with a deadly crisis since March 2011. The violence fueled by Takfiri groups has so far claimed the lives of over 222,000 people, according to the so-called Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
    The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) says over 7.2 million people have been internally displaced, and more than 3 million have been forced to flee the country, Press TV reports.