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UN envoy for Syria likely to announce new schedule for Syria political talks

Xinhua, February 26, 2016 Adjust font size:

The UN special envoy for Syria, Staffan de Mistura, is scheduled to brief the UN Security Council Friday on the indirect negotiations he brokered between the Syrian government and opposition and he is likely to announce a new date for resuming the Syria political talks, a UN spokesman told reporters here Thursday.

De Mistura "will brief the Security Council at 3 p.m. New York time tomorrow," Stephane Dujarric, the UN spokesman, said at a daily news briefing here, adding that the UN special envoy will then hold a press conference in Geneva of Switzerland immediately after his presentation to the Security Council.

He will brief the 15-nation UN body by video link from Geneva, where his office is based, UN officials said here.

"He said today that he would indicate then when the political talks might be resumed," Dujarric said.

On Jan. 29, the UN-mediated talks between the Syrian government and representatives of the country's opposition factions began in Geneva.

On Feb. 3, de Mistura temporarily suspended the peace talks and previously set Feb. 25 as the date for the resumption of the political negotiations.

But he later said that the talks would be impossible to resume on Feb. 25. The Syrian opposition and government delegations blamed each other for the breakdown of the indirect peace talks.

The Friday announcement will come just hours before the warring parties will start to observe a partial ceasefire, also known as the cessation of hostilities across Syria, which is contained in an agreement between Washington and Moscow struck early this week.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and the Security Council welcomed the agreement, which was announced Monday by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov on the terms of a nationwide cessation of hostilities in Syria scheduled to come into effect on Feb. 27.

Kerry and Lavrov reached a provisional agreement on terms of a cessation of hostilities in Syria, where more than 250,000 people have been killed since March 2011. The two foreign ministers are co-chairs of the International Syria Support Group (ISSG) Ceasefire Taskforce formed in Munich, Germany.

The ISSG Ceasefire Task Force will meet in Geneva Friday and be chaired jointly by representatives of Russia and the United States, Dujarric said. Endit