Talks on Syria to be Held in Astana on September 14-15
TERHAN (Tasnim) - Kazakhstan’s capital city of Astana will host another international meeting on the Syrian settlement on September 14-15, the press service of the Kazakh Foreign Ministry said on Friday.
"The high-level international meeting is expected to review a number of documents regulating the activities of de-escalation control forces and continue efforts to agree the composition of a task force in Idlib," the ministry said.
According to the Kazakh Foreign Ministry, the talks are expected to yield de-escalation zone maps in the provinces of Idlib, Homs and in Eastern Ghouta.
The upcoming Astana talks is scheduled to draft provisions on the coordination center and also help formation of a working group on the release of hostages and the detained persons, handover of bodies of those killed and the search for the missing, the statement said.
"The parties are planned to pass a joint statement on humanitarian demining of historical monuments in Syria that are on the list of UNESCO World Heritage Sites. Apart from that, they will discuss other issues of mutual interest," the ministry said.
Ahead of the meeting, on September 13, the guarantor countries plan to hold a meeting of the joint working group.
Astana has hosted five rounds of peace talks for Syria since January. Russia, Iran, and Turkey serve as guarantor states in the peace process. The negotiations are aimed at bringing an end to the foreign-backed militancy in Syria, which began in March 2011.
The Astana talks have so far resulted in an agreement on four de-escalation zones across Syria.
They have been held in tandem with another series of talks hosted by Geneva and brokered by the UN.
When the first round of the Astana talks was organized, the Geneva talks had been stalled for months. The talks in the Kazakh capital then provided momentum for the UN-brokered negotiations, helping revive them.
