Michael Hernandez,Betül Yürük
October 17, 2018•Update: October 18, 2018
By Michael Hernandez
WASHINGTON
The UN's Syria envoy announced Wednesday he will leave his post at the end of November for personal reasons.
"My desire is for purely personal reasons to move on," Staffan de Mistura told the Security Council. "I am not laying down the charge until the last hour of the last day of my mandate."
He will be departing as of the last week of November after serving for more than four years as the UN's point person for the conflict in Syria.
The Italian-Swedish diplomat is the third person to hold the position after former UN Secretary General Kofi Annon and Algerian envoy Lakhdar Brahimi quit the post in 2012 and 2014 respectively.
De Mistura has been running intra-Syrian talks since late 2017 seeking to draft a new constitution for Syria and establish requirements for UN-supervised elections. He said he is going to actively work to convene the constitutional committee before he leaves office, but said the UN is not ready to convene the group unless it is credible and balanced.
He confirmed that he will be traveling to Damascus at the request of the regime next week to discuss the committee's formation, and intends to invite Russia, Iran and Turkey to Geneva for talks before he departs by the end of this month.
The three countries are known as the Astana Guarantors for talks they have mediated in the Kazakh capital.
*Betul Yuruk contributed to this report from the United Nations
