KABUL: (MEP) The United States admitted Tuesday that a lot of work remains to ensure that upcoming Syria talks will be held next week as planned.
Washington is pushing the participants in the UN-led dialogue to keep up their momentum, despite divisions over who will get to represent opposition forces.
But, one day before Secretary of State John Kerry was to meet his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov on Wednesday , the State Department accepted timing was tight.
The top US and Russian diplomats will attempt to strike a deal over who should be allowed to seat at the negotiating table in the Geneva talks slated to begin on Monday.
Obama and Putin, his Russian counterpart, failed to agree on a list in a telephone conversation last week.
State Department spokesman John Kirby said on Tuesday,”The secretary (Kerry) will certainly talk about Syria and our ongoing efforts to get a political transition in place with Foreign Minister Lavrov”.
“It is still our desire to see this meeting occur on the 25th,” he said, adding that Kerry is also in regular contact with the UN envoy for Syria, Staffan de Mistura.
We’re not unmindful of the fact that there still remain differences of opinion, and that this is a complicated process,” Kirby said.
“And that there is still quite a bit of work that needs to be done to get the meeting to occur.”
In Moscow, meanwhile, a senior Russian diplomat expressed optimism that the meeting between Lavrov and Kerry would produce an agreement on the list of eligible opposition figures.
Moscow and Washington put aside deep differences over Syria to form ISSG, but Kirby said he did not know if Russia wants Monday’s talks to take place.
While Washington still demands that President Bashar al-Assad must step down, it has backed away from insisting that the Syrian leader go at the start of a transition process.
At least 400,000 people in Syria are under siege as a foreign-backed militancy is creating disaster across much of the country.
