GENEVA
UN Special Envoy to Syria Staffan de Mistura met Syrian Kurdish party PYD co-chair Salih Muslim in Geneva Sunday as part of an ongoing negotiation process to end the civil war in Syria.
De Mistura has been meeting opposition and Bashar al-Assad regime figures, which even UN officials admit is unlikely to help bring an end to the bloody war. The first meetings in Geneva began Tuesday last week among a gathering that includes more than 40 groups -- some armed -- from Syria.
Asked whether the Geneva consultations would bring peace to the country, de Mistura said Tuesday: "The bottom line is we have no luxury of not trying."
Previous attempts to find a negotiated solution to the war have ended in failure. The first one was in June 2012, again in Geneva, where the conference closed with an agreement called the Geneva Communique that laid out a road map for a transition of power and end to hostilities. It soon fell by the wayside.
The second series of Geneva talks were in January and February 2014, and marked the first time representatives from the opposition and the Syrian regime met around the same table. However, it too produced no tangible results.
The last round of negotiations is expected to last four to six weeks and involves meetings among envoys and experts.
Amid peace talks, fighting continued in Syria over the weekend.
The umbrella group, Army of Conquest, allegedly killed 70 regime troops attempting to break the opposition's siege on the Vatan Hospital in Jisr al-Shugour in Idlib province, said coalition group Syrian Revolutionary General Commission Monday.
People's Protection Units, or YPG, is the armed branch of the Democratic Union Party, or the PYD and has a sizable presence in the conflict, which has killed more than 220,000 people and forced almost four million to flee the country. The civil war in Syria entered its fifth year in March.
