Iranian Diplomat Heads for Geneva to Attend Syria Peace Talks
TEHRAN (Tasnim) – Iranian foreign minister’s special assistant for political affairs, Hossein Jaberi Ansari, left Tehran for the Swiss city of Geneva to hold talks on the latest efforts to help restore peace to war-stricken Syria.
Heading a high-ranking delegation, Jaberi Ansari departed for Geneva on Monday morning to attend a quadrilateral meeting with top negotiators from Russia and Turkey as well as the United Nation's Syria peace envoy, Staffan de Mistura.
The Iranian diplomat is slated to hold bilateral negotiations with the Russian and Turkish top negotiators about the Syria peace process on Monday evening.
He will also attend the quadrilateral meeting between Iran, Russia and Turkey -the three guarantor states of de-escalation zones in Syria- as well as the UN Syria envoy on Tuesday morning.
The meetings will revolve around ways to facilitate the inauguration of the Syrian Constitutional Committee.
In April, the presidents of Iran, Russia and Turkey held a meeting in Ankara to discuss ways for peaceful settlement of the crisis in Syria.
Since January 2017, Kazakhstan’s capital of Astana has hosted several rounds of peace talks that led to an agreement on de-escalation zones across Syria.
The talks in Astana have been going on in tandem with UN-brokered Geneva talks.
The conflict that broke out in Syria in 2011 has claimed the lives of over 470,000 people, injured 1.9 million others, and displaced nearly half of the country’s pre-war population of about 23 million within or beyond its borders.
