Three-party Syria meeting ends with no solution

International Syria envoy Lakhdar Brahimi said after talks with Russian and US diplomats on Friday that a political solution to the Syrian conflict is unlikely to emerge in the near future.

No practical deals were announced after the five-hour meeting of the UN-Arab League envoy with Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov and US Deputy Secretary of State William Burns at the UN’s European headquarters in Geneva.

“If you are asking me whether a solution is around the corner, I am not sure that is the case,” Brahimi said in a video released by the UN News Centre after the talks.

“What I am certain of is … that it is the wider international community, especially members of the Security Council, that can really create the opening that is necessary to start effectively solving the problem,” he went on. “In our view, there is no military solution for this conflict.”

With the conflict approaching its two-year mark, and the UN recently saying that total deaths may have surpassed 60,000, all international efforts to end the fighting have failed thus far, with Russia and China blocking several Western-backed UN Security Council resolutions.