PARIS, January 12, 20:55 /ITAR-TASS/. The Friends of Syria Group has strongly recommended Syrian President Bashar Assad’s opponents to take part in an international peace conference on Syria, the Geneva-2.
“We urge the National Coalition to respond positively to the invitation to set up the Syrian opposition delegation sent by the U.N. Secretary General,” the Friends of Syria said in a joint communique. “We invite them to form, as soon as possible, a delegation of opposition forces to participate in the political process.”
However, the leader of Syria’s National Coalition of Opposition and Revolutionary Forces, Ahmad al-Jarba, who took part in the Paris meeting, did not say whether the coalition would send a delegation to the Geneva-2 conference. He claimed that all the delegations present at the Paris meeting had agreed that the regime of [Syrian President] Bashar Assad had no future in Syria.
Meanwhile, participants in the Paris meeting of the foreign ministers from the Friends of Syria Group agreed that the only way to settle the political situation in Syria was a peace conference in the Geneva-2 format. “There is no other political solution,” French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said on behalf of the group. “There will be no political solution for Syria unless Geneva-2 meets.”
The international peace conference on Syria is expected to begin on January 22 in Switzerland’s Montreux.