Syrian gov't delegation joins second round of peace talks in Geneva

The Syrian government delegation led by its Ambassador to UN Bashar Ja'afari arrived here on Friday and held their first discussion with UN Special Envoy for Syria Staffan de Mistura later Friday evening.

Speaking during a press conference right after the meeting, Ja'afari described their first session with the UN Special Envoy as "constructive and fruitful".

"We talked about the paper of 12 principles being delivered by the Envoy on the last day of the last round of the talks, and actually the paper was based on the paper we delivered to him during the first day we met him last time," he said.

He added that he have provided to the UN envoy the considerations of his delegation and hopefully will receive some responses from the other delegation during their second meeting, which is scheduled on Monday morning at 11:00 a.m.local time.

The second round of proximity talks aiming to broker a political end to the Syrian crisis had started on Wednesday, with the UN special envoy meeting with the Syrian opposition delegation of the High Negotiations Committee (HNC).

To date the UN-mediated talks have made little progress to end the five-year war which has killed over a quarter million people and displaced millions of others.

The first of three scheduled rounds of negotiations which ended last month yielded 12 points of commonalities between warring factions, but failed to touch upon the issue of political transition, which according to de Mistura, will become the major topic for the just-opened second round of the talks. Endit