NEW YORK – The United Nations said on Saturday that it intended to move ahead with peace talks between the Syrian government and rebel forces in late January, a signal to all parties that a tenuous political process aimed at ending the war would not be quashed by gains and losses on the battlefield.
The announcement by Staffan de Mistura, the U.N. special envoy for Syria, set a “target date” to start talks on Jan. 25 in Geneva. It included a nudge not just to the Syrian rivals but to their patrons in capitals around the world, who for the first time in nearly five years have agreed on a road map to end the nearly five-year war.
The announcement came a day after the death of the leader of a powerful rebel group that had been taking part in preliminary talks to choose the rebels’ representatives for any negotiations mediated by the U.N.
Both the government and the opposition confirmed that airstrikes on Friday killed the rebel leader, Zahran Alloush, a commander of the so-called Army of Islam, which is opposed to both the forces loyal to President Bashar Assad and the Islamic State group. It was unclear whether those airstrikes were carried out by Russia, which says it is targeting terrorist groups inside the country, or by Syrian warplanes.
In any case, the airstrikes appeared to have been intended as a message to the rebels and their backers in the Arab world that Assad and his supporters were trying to weaken any potential bloc of armed opposition groups.
De Mistura’s statement on Saturday, calling for “full cooperation of all the relevant Syrian parties in this process,” sought to prevent Alloush’s death from setting back the peace plan adopted at the U.N. this month.
Led by Secretary of State John Kerry and his Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, the talks brought regional rivals, including Iran, Saudi Arabia and Turkey, around the table three times in the past few months to agree to a plan for ending the conflict.
“This is an exercise forced upon them, which is very good,” one U.N. diplomat said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the delicacy of the negotiations. “But we still need to test how far they will want to go.”