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Middle East and North Africa

Lavrov, Kerry and Brahimi to discuss Syria again on sidelines of UN General Assembly

U.N. General Assembly session will take place in New York at the end of this month

Photo EPA/JEAN-MARC FERRE / HANDOUT

Photo EPA/JEAN-MARC FERRE / HANDOUT

GENEVA, September 13 (Itar-Tass) - Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Joint Special Envoy of the United Nations and the League of Arab States for the Syrian Crisis Lakhdar Brahimi will have a meeting devoted to Syria on the sidelines of a session of the U.N. General Assembly in New York at the end of this month.

“We agreed to meet on the sidelines of a U.N. General Assembly session to discuss which situation we are facing and find what the parties to the Syrian conflict are thinking about this. We believe that we will be able to talk more concretely in New York,” Lavrov told reporters after the meeting with John Kerry and Lakhdar Brahimi in Geneva on Friday.

U.S Secretary of State John Kerry told reporters after a trilateral meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Joint Special Envoy of the United Nations and the League of Arab States on the Syrian Crisis Lakhdar Brahimi that Russia and the United States agreed to continue the talks over convening a peace conference on Syria dubbed Geneva-2 in New York in September.

A meeting between Lavrov, Kerry and Brahimi was scheduled to take place in Geneva on Friday, September 13.

Brahimi said he was hopeful that the talks on an international conference on Syria commonly known as Geneva II could resume after Russia and the United States had come to agreement on Syrian chemical weapons.

On Thursday, September 12, Brahimi met with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry. “We spoke about Syria, about Geneva, and he’s still committed to it and we hope that once they have done what they have to do with the Russians on this chemical issue, we will start talking again about Geneva,” the U.N. and LAS envoy said.

The talks between Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry with the participation of experts on Syrian chemical weapons are not hopeless. A result may be achieved by Friday evening, a source in the Russian delegation told Itar-Tass.

The talks are proceeding constructively. The process is not hopeless, the source said. "We hope to come to a common denominator on chemical weapons in Syria by the evening," he said.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon urged the international community to continue efforts to convene an international conference on Syria, known as Geneva II, amid speculation about a possible military operation against that country.

“It is important that we continue to pursue, to convene a Geneva conference as soon as possible. This political resolution, political solution, is the only viable option at this time,” Ban said on September 9.

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