SOCHI: Delegates on Monday arrived in Russia for peace talks aimed at ending the Syrian conflict, but hopes of progress were dimmed after the main opposition group and the Kurds said they would boycott the event.

Regime-backer Moscow has invited 1,600 people to the talks in the Black Sea resort of Sochi as part of a broader push to consolidate its influence in the Middle East and start hammering out a path to a political solution to end the seven-year war.

The aim of the Tuesday congress is to bring Syria closer to creating a post-war constitution, after two days of separate UN-backed talks in Vienna last week closed with the warring sides not even meeting face-to-face to discuss the groundwork for the document.

The Kremlin has downplayed expectations of the event, with presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov telling journalists Monday that “breakthroughs in the task of political regulation in Syria are hardly possible”.

He added however that under-representation will not “disrupt this congress or undermine its importance”, calling the Sochi talks a “very important” step toward peace.

The Syrian Negotiation Commission (SNC), the country’s main opposition group, said following the talks in Vienna on Thursday and Friday that it would not attend the Sochi congress.

While the government will not be represented as such at the congress, President Bashar al-Assad’s ruling Baath Party and other allied movements are attending.

Rebel boycott

The SNC accused Assad and his Russian backers of continuing to rely on military might — and showing no willingness to enter into honest negotiations — as the war in which more than 340,000 people have already died approaches its seventh anniversary.

More than three dozen other Syrian rebel groups, including influential Islamists, had previously said they would not come to Sochi.

And authorities from Syria’s Kurdish autonomous region said Sunday they would not participate because of an ongoing Turkish offensive on the Kurdish enclave of Afrin.

Turkey, which supports Syrian rebels vying for Assad’s ouster, is co-sponsoring the congress along with regime-backer Iran.

Despite the boycotts, the Kremlin’s special envoy on the Syria peace process Alexander Lavrentiev told Russian news agencies that 1,500 out of 1,600 guests invited to the congress would be there.

Regime air raids kill 33

Meanwhile, regime air strikes killed 33 civilians in 24 hours in Syria’s north-western province of Idlib where government forces are fighting militants, a monitor said on Monday.

On Monday alone, the strikes killed 16 civilians including 11 in a vegetable market in the town of Saraqeb, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

The 17 others were killed on Sunday in raids on various areas of the province, large parts of which are controlled by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which is dominated by Al Qaeda’s former Syria affiliate.

“Regime war planes have intensified their strikes over the past 24 hours after relative calm due to bad weather,” Observatory chief Rami Abdul Rahman said.

Published in Dawn, January 30th, 2018