The Syrian National Council (SNC), which is trying to unite opponents to the regime of President Bashar Assad, was holding negotiations behind closed doors here with rivals on Saturday. Several opposition movements are trying to reach an alliance, a member of the SNC, Khaled Khoja, told AFP.
“We have been holding discussions for several days with Burhan Ghalioun, there are also Kurds and representatives of tribes,” he said. Ghalioun, an academic based in France, was recently designated the leader of a rival opposition grouping, the National Transitional Council, which has Islamist and nationalist supporters.
“When the SNC meets, there will be a new assembly which will be expanded to these new movements,” Khoja said, adding that the meeting scheduled to be held on Saturday would now not take place before Sunday at the earliest because of the negotiations. The SNC, the largest and most representative Syrian opposition grouping, was founded in Istanbul at the end of August and numbers 140 members, half of them living in Syria. The Istanbul meeting of members currently outside Syria is due to elect the president of the SNC and heads of various committees.
SNC spokeswoman Basma Qoudmani said the grouping also hoped to secure the support of the influential Muslim Brotherhood, which has been long-established in Syria in the face of savage repression by the regime, and of a pro-democracy movement formed in Damascus in 2005. Diplomatic sources in Damascus said the SNC’s rise could result from an agreement between the United States, Turkey and the Muslim Brotherhood and unite the main opposition strands: nationalists, liberals and Islamists.
Elsewhere on the political front, Syria’s ambassador to the United States Imad Mustapha was called in to the State Department and “read the riot act” about an attempted attack on US ambassador Robert Ford.
Mustapha “was reminded that Ambassador Ford is the personal representative of the president (Barack Obama) and an attack on Ford is an attack on the United States,” State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland told reporters.
The UN Security Council remains divided over whether to threaten Assad’s regime with sanctions over its deadly crackdown on dissent. European nations on Friday dropped the word “sanctions” from a proposed resolution on Syria in a bid to temper Russian opposition. France, Britain, Germany and Portugal instead called for “targeted measures” in their draft text. Russia and China have threatened to veto any resolution calling for punitive measures against Damascus.
