Saudi Arabia, Iran agree talks on Syria

(Reuters) – Arch-rivals Saudi Arabia and Iran announced they would attend international talks in Vienna on Friday on the Syrian conflict, in what will be their first meeting to discuss the four-year-long war.

Saudi Arabia said it aimed to gauge during the talks the willingness of Iran and Russia, the main backers of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his government, for a peace deal, Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir said on Wednesday.

“The view of our partners … was that we should test the intentions of the Iranians and the Russians in arriving at a political solution in Syria, which we all prefer,” al-Jubeir told a news conference in the Saudi capital Riyadh.

Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif and three of his deputies will travel to Vienna, Iranian state news agencies said. It will be the first time that Tehran has been represented in international discussions on the Syrian crisis.

Iran says it supports a political solution in Syria, but says Assad should be part of the process. Opposition groups, and their regional backers including Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey, say Assad must leave power as a precondition for peace.

Al-Jubeir said Saudi Arabia and its allies would hold a separate meeting on Friday to seek “the time and means of Bashar al-Assad’s exit”.

The White House said the peace talks could only work if “all key stakeholders” were invited, adding that Iran’s participation should not overshadow the efforts to end the Syrian crisis.

“The United States is prepared to work with any nation, including Russia and Iran, to resolve the conflict in Syria,” White House spokesman Eric Schultz told reporters.

Egypt, Iraq, Qatar, Lebanon, the European Union and France also said they would attend Friday’s talks, which come a day after a smaller round of negotiations between the United States, Russia, Saudi Arabia and Turkey.

Around a dozen participants are expected in total.

It was not clear whether any invitation had been issued to either the Syrian government or the opposition. Neither side was present at the last talks in Vienna.

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Speaking at a news conference in Riyadh with his Saudi counterpart, British foreign minister Philip Hammond said he hoped the meeting would encourage dialogue between the rivals, who back opposing sides in conflicts across the Arab world.

“Saudi Arabia and Iran are the two most important and powerful countries in this region. It is very much in the long-term interests of the region that eventually these two countries are able to talk to each other, are able to discuss differences, are able to seek solutions peacefully,” Hammond said.

The Syrian National Coalition, an opposition group based in Turkey and backed by Western powers, said Iran’s participation in the talks would undermine the political process.

“Iran has only one project – to keep Assad in power … They don’t believe in the principle of the talks,” said the coalition’s vice-president Hisham Marwa.

The secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, Ali Shamkhani, told reporters during a visit to Pakistan that Tehran would join the Syria talks “with no pre-conditions”.

A senior Western diplomat in New York said on Wednesday: “We have got to start from a fairly low base given that you’ve got Russia and Iran on one side and everyone else on the other.”