U.N. envoy: Syrian talks to start Saturday

Geneva, Switzerland

 A day later than originally planned, delegations for the Syrian government and the Syrian opposition will meet in the same room for face-to-face talks on Saturday.U.N. special envoy Lakhdar Brahimi made the announcement on Friday after he met separately with each side to apparently prevent an immediate breakdown in the peace process for Syria's civil war.The delegations originally were scheduled to sit down in the same room on Friday in Geneva, but Brahimi needed more time to set up talks intended to carry out an earlier agreement pushed by the international community to end the Syrian fighting and set up a transitional government.Citing U.N. sources, Syrian state TV reported that Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Moallem told Brahimi that if a serious meeting was not held Saturday, "the Syrian official delegation will leave Geneva because of the lack of seriousness and readiness of the other party (i.e., the opposition)."The opposition delegation also warned that unless it saw movement on the issue of a transitional government -- that is, that the government shifts on its position that President Bashar al-Assad will remain in power -- it would not take part in the face-to-face talks.Brahimi's announcement showed progress to overcome such an early hurdle, but also the difficulty in even launching negotiations to end violence that has claimed more than 100,000 lives since 2011.The war has become increasingly sectarian, drawing in Syria's regional neighbors and forcing out more than 2 million refugees, many of them children."We know it's going to be very, very hard," U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said Friday in a speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos.At the same time, he noted that diplomacy already got the al-Assad regime to turn over its known chemical weapons stockpile to the international community for destruction.The fighting that Kerry said included atrocities by the al-Assad regime made Syria "the world's greatest single individual magnet for jihad and terror," and he made clear that the United States supports the opposition position that al-Assad must go. 

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