UNITED NATIONS: The five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council were struggling to agree on a draft resolution endorsing an international bid to end the five-year-old civil war in Syria, as ministerial talks began in New York on Friday.

Western powers had hoped the council would rubber-stamp a resolution endorsing a two-year road map for talks between Syria’s government and opposition on a unity government, expected to begin in January, and eventual elections.

Council diplomats said they aimed to clinch an agreement on a text. But a deal remained elusive on Friday morning as talks among the 17 members of the so-called International Syria Support Group got underway at New York’s Palace Hotel.

The 15-nation Security Council was scheduled to meet at 3pm to discuss Syria, but it was not yet clear whether they would have a resolution to adopt.

The road map, which also calls for a nationwide ceasefire that would not apply to the militant Islamic State group, Nusra Front and some other militant groups, was worked out in two rounds of ministerial talks in Vienna.

Russian Ambassador Vitaly Churkin suggested there were significant disagreements on the draft resolution among the Security Council’s five veto powers — the United States, Britain, France, Russia and China.

“I’m not sure it’s going to happen because there are some unfortunately deliberate, or not deliberate, attempts to undercut the Vienna documents and we don’t want to see that,” he told reporters on Thursday without elaborating.

Diplomats said the main problem with the resolution involved Russian and Iranian concerns about how to refer to a bloc of opposition groups that would join UN-led peace talks with the Syrian government set to begin in January.

Published in Dawn, December 19th, 2015