US team in Geneva for Syria talks

A team from the United States has headed for Geneva to hold talks with their Russian counterparts and UN envoy to Syria Lakhdar Brahimi to set the date and agenda for an international conference on Syria.

“They’ll discuss the agenda, participants, all of those issues,” US State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki told reporters on Tuesday. But “I don’t know that it will be conclusive. I wouldn’t anticipate that.”

The conference was likely to be held in the Swiss city in mid-June but the event, spearheaded by the US and Russia, was later postponed to July with no exact date and agenda set for the meeting yet.

The prospects of holding the international meeting in June began to diminish last week after the EU announced it had decided to lift its arms embargo on Syria to enable the member states to send arms to the militants fighting against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

The move was followed by Russia’s announcement that it would go ahead with a contract with Syria to send its state-of-the-art S-300 missiles to the Arab country to prevent “some hotheads” from entering the conflict.

The US also said on Monday that it would deploy Patriot missiles and F16 fighter jets to Jordan, further complicating the situation in Syria.

The moves to further militarize the crisis in Syria placed the Geneva conference in limbo. In addition, the Syrian opposition said it would not participate in the meeting unless Assad stepped down and disagreements over the guest list continued with Russia insisting that the presence of Iran would be indispensable for the conference to yield any results, a suggestion the West strongly opposes.

Last year’s conference in Geneva turned out to be abortive as the plan the participants carved out failed to consider a role for President Assad in the transitional government.