In the capital of Kazakhstan Astana has begun talks on Syria. The meeting is being held in the Rixos hotel. On Monday, January 23, reports TASS.
It is noted that the delegations of the Syrian government and the armed opposition for the first time sat down at the negotiating table. In addition, the meeting was attended by representatives of Kazakhstan, Iran, the UN, the US, Turkey and Russia.
The main theme of the meeting — confirmation of the armistice agreements of December 29, and advance the political negotiation process for consultations in Geneva on 8 February.
As noted by RIA Novosti, the organizers of the meeting in order to unify the positions of the negotiating parties deliberately did not put on the table signs for the opposition and Damascus, marking the two delegations as the “Syrian Arab Republic”.
29 December 2016, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced that they had reached agreement on a cease-fire in Syria and that the government of the Republic and the armed opposition agreed to begin negotiations. The ceasefire in all the Syrian areas in force at 00:00 on December 30. The guarantors of the truce made by Turkey and Russia.
The opposition of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and rebels seeking his overthrow, has been running since 2011. The conflict escalated into full-scale civil war, which strengthened the terrorist organization, including banned in Russia as extremist grouping “Islamic state”.