A secret meeting was held in Berlin with a group of Syrians to discuss ways to solve the decadelong conflict in their homeland.
The participants of the two-day meeting included people from areas under the rule of the Assad regime and from exile, as well as members of important families and tribes.
They are meeting without an official mandate, but with the aim of finding a solution after almost 11 years of civil war.
The initiative sees itself as an addition to the official U.N.-mediated negotiations in Geneva between the regime and opposition, which have been deadlocked for a long time.
The aim is to bridge the gap between the opposing camps, said Naseef Naeem, a German-Syrian national who moderated the meeting.
With the help of their allies Russia and Iran, the supporters of Bashar Assad now control around two-thirds of the country again. The rest is under the control of Turkish troops, opposition forces or the PKK's Syrian offshoot YPG terrorists.
The United Nations special envoy for Syria Geir Pedersen recently said he hopes to hold the seventh round of Constitutional Committee talks in Geneva next month.
The 2012 U.N. road map to peace in Syria calls for the drafting of a new constitution and ends with U.N.-supervised elections with all Syrians eligible to participate, including members of the diaspora.
The committee meetings, which started in October 2019 with 150 members, are the first concrete step to draft a new constitution to determine Syria's future.
Syria has been embroiled in a vicious civil war since early 2011 when the Assad regime cracked down on pro-democracy protests with brute ferocity.
Syria’s conflict has killed over 350,000 people and displaced half of the country’s prewar population of 23 million people, including more than 5 million refugees mostly in neighboring countries.
A round of Syrian peace talks in Geneva last year failed as the sides could not agree on how to engage. After the fifth round of negotiations failed in late January, Pedersen hinted the Syrian regime delegation was to blame for the lack of progress.
